City Burning: New Approaches to Measure the UHI and Its Effect on Urban Energy Balance

Climate change represents one of the main threats to which our planet is called to respond. IPCC highlights how to climate variability will intensify in the coming decades and extreme events related will constitute a growing risk for our cities, like the heatwaves. In particular, the urban heat island (UHI) effect further exacerbates the heat stress resulting from them by determining an increase of energy consumption. The international scientific framework shows that the energy consumption of a territory depends on the urban assets and, vice versa, the energy balance is linked to the physical and functional organization of the settlement such as the behaviour of citizens. The aim of this work is to define a methodology for measuring the weight of the urban characteristics on UHI that mainly affect the energy balance. Innovative tools are used to develop a spatial analysis by regression analysis that is combined with a second analysis on the influence of variables on the energy balance of urban areas through a hot-spot density. The experimentation is carried out on the city of Naples, which differs in its settlement, functional and demographic characteristics, showing the classification of highly or less critical urban areas.