“Research trends on environmental, energy and vulnerability impacts of Urban Heat Islands: An overview”

Abstract

Abstract Scientific research on Urban heat islands (UHI) and urban overheating has set new challenges for societies regarding risk and vulnerabilities, energy demands and mitigation strategies to favor urban environmental quality conditions against urban pollution. This review manuscript addresses systematically 171 relevant studies to identify and characterize gaps in the field of knowledge, through a robust evidence-based analysis focused on identifying taxonomic recurrences, trends in the study of urban fields of impact, global leaderships, mitigation strategies, methodological divergences, remote sensing indexes, data sources, legal frame, among other significant aspects on the context of environmental degradation and energy. The results showed that studies were carried out in 37 countries and 92 cities, mainly in North America (33%), Europe (31%), and Asia (27%) although mainly concentrated in five countries (59%) with an endogenous bias towards domestic microscale purposes. Prevailing topics, multidisciplinary interactions and regulations are focused on the study of Urban Environmental Quality degradation (95%) and on issues related to Energy (25%) demand and efficiency with applications on land cover with high interest on material science, and urban design and planning. The need to implement multiscale studies, motivate policies oriented to prevent health vulnerability and promote energy safety for urban resilience is imperative.