Abstract—Climate change is one of the main concerns of our
times, and it became even more noticeable due to its impact on
global temperature, precipitation patterns, and even arctic sea
ice melting. Moreover, it has been proven that climate change is
one of the main factors affecting the Urban Heat Island (UHI);
which in its turn, increases the energy demand in sustainable
cities, where reducing power costs still a major challenge.
Furthermore, in order to keep a balanced environment, and
contribute to temperature mitigation, the use of vegetation cover
is definitely one remarkable strategy. It helps decreasing the
temperature down to the values required in sustainable
development, reducing energy consumption, and lowering
Greenhouse Emission (GHE). In this work, we assess the impact
of green-roofs on UHI, and we try to define a decision model that
helps calculating the best green-roof/green-infrastructure ratio.
Besides, we aim to identify the best practices and measures to
take in order to mitigate the UHI in semi-arid climate areas.
Our work involves the use of a Geographic Information
System (GIS), which provides a support to estimate the greenery
conditions. Our methodology is based on a probabilistic and
comparative approach, and evaluated using different green-roof
models. We select a residential area in Constantine, Algeria as
our study subject, and we use ENVI-met as the software support.
Among the findings of this study, providing proper, yet
experimentally proven recommendations on how, how much and
where to use green roofs, was our main contribution. In addition,
the results of our study indicate not only the impact of
green-roofs on UHI, but also the effect of large-scale green-roof
installation on the liveable areas in sustainable cities.
Index Terms—Climate change, geographic information
system, green-roofs, sustainable development, urban heat island.
The authors are with Laboratory Bioclimatic Architecture and
Environment, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of
Constantine 3, Algeria (e-mail: sarah.sahnoune@gmail.com,
farah.alg@hotmail.com).
Cite: Sara Sahnoune and Nassira Benhassine, "Quantifying the Impact of Green-Roofs on Urban Heat Island Mitigation," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 116-123, 2017.