Abstract
Urban overheating, driven by global climate change and urban
development, is a major contemporary challenge which substantially
impacts urban livability and sustainability. Overheating represents a
multi-faceted threat to well-being, performance, and health of
individuals as well as the energy efficiency and economy of cities, and
it is influenced by complex interactions between building, city, and
global scale climates. In recent decades, extensive discipline-specific
research has characterized urban heat and assessed its implications on
human life, including ongoing efforts to bridge neighboring disciplines.
The research horizon now encompasses complex problems involving a wide
range of disciplines, and therefore comprehensive and integrated
assessments are needed that address such interdisciplinarity. Here, the
objective is to go beyond a review of existing literature and provide a
broad overview and future outlook for integrated assessments of urban
overheating, defining holistic pathways for addressing the impacts on
human life. We (i) detail the characterization of heat exposure across
different scales and in various disciplines, (ii) identify individual
sensitivities to urban overheating that increase vulnerability and cause
adverse impacts in different populations, (iii) elaborate on adaptive
capacities that individuals and cities can adopt, (iv) document the
impacts of urban overheating on health and energy, and (v) discuss
frontiers of theoretical and applied urban climatology, built
environment design, and governance toward reduction of heat exposure and
vulnerability at various scales. The most critical challenges in future
research and application are identified, targeting both the gaps and the
need for greater integration in overheating assessments.