Abstract

Climate change is one of the main concerns of ourtimes, and it became even more noticeable due to its impact onglobal temperature, precipitation patterns, and even arctic seaice melting. Moreover, it has been proven that climate change isone of the main factors affecting the Urban Heat Island (UHI);which in its turn, increases the energy demand in sustainablecities, where reducing power costs still a major challenge.Furthermore, in order to keep a balanced environment, andcontribute to temperature mitigation, the use of vegetation coveris definitely one remarkable strategy. It helps decreasing thetemperature down to the values required in sustainabledevelopment, reducing energy consumption, and loweringGreenhouse Emission (GHE). In this work, we assess the impactof green-roofs on UHI, and we try to define a decision model thathelps calculating the best green-roof/green-infrastructure ratio.Besides, we aim to identify the best practices and measures totake in order to mitigate the UHI in semi-arid climate areas.<br>Our work involves the use of a Geographic InformationSystem (GIS), which provides a support to estimate the greeneryconditions. Our methodology is based on a probabilistic andcomparative approach, and evaluated using different green-roofmodels. We select a residential area in Constantine, Algeria asour study subject, and we use ENVI-met as the software support.Among the findings of this study, providing proper, yetexperimentally proven recommendations on how, how much andwhere to use green roofs, was our main contribution. In addition,the results of our study indicate not only the impact ofgreen-roofs on UHI, but also the effect of large-scale green-roofinstallation on the liveable areas in sustainable cities.