How can cities tackle urban heat islands? | With Joan Ballester

In this video, Joan Ballester, Associate Reseach Professor at ISGlobal explains the impact of urban heat islands on human health and what cities can do to avoid them. An urban heat island is a phenomenon in which the temperature in a city is significantly higher than in the surrounding area. The causes of the urban heat island effect are very diverse: during daytime the efficiency of the convection, evaporation and the amount of energy released through latent or sensitive heat play an important role, whereas during nighttime it's more related to anthropogenic heat, the landscape and the city characteristics such as population, size and level of urbanisation. J. Ballester: "Mitigation measures are essentially more natural solutions like increasing green surfaces in the city, which in turn increase evaporation; or painting buildings in more reflective colors against solar radiation." Watch the video to learn more!