Mining the Web of Science for African cities and climate change (1991–2021)

This study provides a synthetic overview of thirty years of research devoted to urban climate change in Africa. Which cities in Africa are being researched on the impacts of climate change affecting them? What are the main social and urban issues and how are they linked? Is the development of climate services envisaged for these cities? Related to which local issues? Some answers are drawn by text mining the metadata of more than a thousand articles published in the 1991–2021 period and recorded in the Web of Science. The evidences produced are based on the design and exploitation of a taxonomy of keywords forming a set of issues and on their articulation in a network based on their co-occurrences in the articles' metadata. Forty-eight African countries and 134 cities are cited, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, Cape Town, Accra, Lagos, Durban, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala and Johannesburg being the cities deferring the largest number of studies. The salient urban climate change issues-health, water, energy, social issues and governance, followed by agriculture and food, mitigation, heat, urban territories, risks and hazards-are generally addressed in their interdependences. Urbanization and the implementation of associated policies, as well as the management of water resources, floods health and energy, and land use and land cover changes to a less extent, are proving to be the most pressing challenges. In view of the intricacy of these issues, climate services appear underdeveloped in African cities and barely confined to the acquisition and modeling of environmental data for decision-making in adaptation planning

Urban Climate, Human behavior & Energy consumption: from LCZ mapping to simulation and urban planning (the MapUCE project)

International audienceThe MApUCE project aims to integrate in urban policies and most relevant legal documents quantitative data from urban microclimate, climate and energy.The primary objective of this project is to obtain climate and energy quantitative data from numerical simulations, focusing on urban microclimate and building energy consumption in the residential and service sectors, which represents in France 41% of the final energy consumption. Both aspects are coupled as building energy consumption is highly meteorologically dependent (e.g. domestic heating, air-conditioning) and heat waste impact the Urban Heat Island. We propose to develop, using national databases, a generic and automated method for generating Local Climate Zones (LCZ) for all cities in France, including the urban architectural, geographical and sociological parameters necessary for energy and microclimate simulations.As will be presented, previous projects on adaptation of cities to climate change have shown that human behavior is a very potent level to address energy consumption reduction, as much as urban forms or architectural technologies. Therefore, in order to further refine the coupled urban climate and energy consumption calculations, we will develop within TEB (and its Building Energy Module) a model of energy consumer behavior.The second objective of the project is to propose a methodology to integrate quantitative data in urban policies. Lawyers analyze the potential levers in legal and planning documents. A few “best cases” are also studied, in order to evaluate their performances. Finally, based on urban planning agencies requirements, we will define vectors to include quantified energy-climate data to legal urban planning documents. These vectors have to be understandable by urban planners and contain the relevant information.To meet these challenges, the project is organized around strongly interdisciplinary partners in the following fields: law, urban climate, building energetics, architecture, sociology, geography and meteorology, as well as the national federation of urban planning agencies.In terms of results, the cross-analysis of input urban parameters and urban micro-climate-energy simulated data will be available on-line as standardized maps for each of the studied cities. The urban parameter production tool as well as the models will be available as open-source. LCZ and associated urban (and social!) indicators may be integrated within the WUDAPT database

Diminuer la vulnérabilité des villes à la hausse des températures

International audienceL’influence du climat sur la conception des villes n’est plus à démontrer. En revanche, le fait que la ville puisse influencer son climat au point de créer des microclimats est une idée neuve qui peine à s’imposer. La transformation de la géométrie des surfaces et l’altération des échanges d’énergie et d’eau entre l’atmosphère et le sol artificialisé se traduit, dans l’espace urbain, par une modification du régime des vents, une hausse de l’humidité et de la pluviométrie et par une augmentation de la température par rapport à ce que l’on observe dans l’espace rural environnant. L’îlot de chaleur urbain(ICU), ou l’élévation localisée des températures en centre-ville , est le phénomène le mieux connu d’un point de vue scientifique et médiatique dont traite cet article, qui envisage aussi le rôle de l’aménagement sur le climat urbain pour lutter notamment contre la hausse des températures

dossier : Villes et climat : au carrefour de la recherche, de l'action et de la participation

International audienc

A Territorial Approach to Urban Spaces between Sustainability and Liveability

International audienceCities have never been as crowded as they are today, with half of the world's population living in urban areas. The habitability of urban spaces is also challenged by contemporary urbanization. Habitability issues may also arise due to the remoteness or limited accessibility to parts of the population. As a global process, urbanization refers to similar developments without totally erasing specificities of each city or their territories. Housing and habitat issues provide an angle for the analysis of urban spaces, showing how much they are torn between sustainability and habitability at the first stage. Cities and, more broadly, urban spaces are marked by these different forms of mobility, which play a large part in their recent transformations and reflect the issues of sustainability as well as habitability in other ways. The climate in its multiple dimensions and scales is now recognized as a new issue ? or even a motive ? for land use planning

La fabrique du développement urbain durable à Marrakech : Effets de contexte, interprétations et construction de l'Agenda 21 local

National audienc

Perceptions du climat et appréhension des enjeux climatiques dans les quartiers pavillonnaires de la périphérie toulousaine

International audienceCet article reprend en partie les résultats d'une recherche du PIRVE qui impliquait chercheurs en géographie sociale, géographes de l'environnement et climatologues de l'urbain. Les chercheurs tentaient de comprendre les interférences entre les perceptions du climat et les pratiques des habitants de deux quartiers périurbains de Toulouse dans les communes de Blagnac et de Saint-Orens. La " météo-sensibilité " de ces habitants semble influencée par des représentations, des perceptions et des savoirs socialement constitué