Sustainable future cities: monitoring urban ecosystem services
Configuration of green areas in Lausanne on the basis of hydroclimatic and CO2 fluxes
Challenges addressed
Today, most of the world's population lives in cities, which are projected to continue growing in the coming years. In conjunction with the urbanisation trend, global warming brings the topic of how to make living in future cities sustainable to the forefront. With cities expected to become hotter and drier (due to urban heat and dry island effects), urban ecosystem services, and especially urban greening, are offered as appealing solutions to mitigate urban heat, increase urban water storage, and reduce urban-CO2 emissions.
The purpose of this project is to investigate the impact of various vegetation types and urban green areas on urban heat mitigation through evaporative cooling, water budget, and CO2 fluxes. This project will be the first step towards answering the following simple yet still open question: how should urban green areas be configured to minimise urban heat, maximise water recharge, and act as a CO2 sink? Answering such a question is crucial for providing greener, healthier, and more sustainable environments for a growing urban population. Ultimately, this project will have a direct impact on the planning of greener urban environments that will improve cities' resiliency to global warming and bring the vision of "net zero carbon cities" closer to reality.
Objectives
The project will take place in Lausanne, which will serve as an "open-air laboratory". Hydroclimatic and CO2 fluxes will be measured in several green areas of the city that have varying vegetation types using a mobile flux tower. Sensors will be deployed to monitor the microclimate, soil moisture, and plant productivity in the selected location. By developing an "urban mobile flux unit" and obtaining results from a field campaign, the project will be used as "proof of concept" for a larger grant proposal to be submitted upon completion of this project.
What are the expected outputs of this project?
To show how Lausanne’s carbon, energy and water fluxes (at the city scale) change based on different characteristics of the urban ecosystem (i.e. at the scale of individual green spaces). This will be the first step towards mapping ecosystem response at the city scale, which will be the basis of a larger project based on the results of this one.
Milestones
- March to April 2022
Flux tower deployed on Géopolis’s roof
- May 2023
Data validated against independent sensors
- June to August 2023
Flux tower ‘mobilised’ in three different locations
- August and September 2023
Sufficient data collected as “proof of concept”, writing of a paper and follow-up proposal for the SNSF
Funding
This project is financed by CLIMACT.
Principal investigators
Prof. Nadav Peleg
FGSE, UNIL
Collaborators
Prof. Gabriele Manoli
ENAC, EPFL
