Understanding the Role of Blue-Green Infrastructure in Abatement of Urban Heat Island Effect

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) is identified as one of the most effective solutions for alleviating the adverse impacts of Urban Heat Island (UHI) as it is found to create 2–4 °C cooler environment than the adjacent built-up areas. The rapid urbanization, which often comes at a loss of BGI, going to worsen the UHI phenomenon looking at the current and future trends of climate change. Hence, a temporal and spatial analysis is conducted in the city of Singapore to comprehend the correlation between improvement in BGI and their influence on temperature reduction by employing thermal remote sensing data. It is observed that a nearly 8% increase in BGI is able to reduce temperature by 1.21 °C in Singapore. The size of BGI is also found to significantly impact effective cooling distance (distance to which cooling effect of BGI is observed), which increases with an increase in the size of BGI. The findings of this study have considerable implications for countries of developing regions also (the study was conducted in Singapore, a developed country due to the primary stage of BGI planning in developing regions) as it not only analyses the positive impact of BGI on abatement of UHI but also emphasizes the need for distributed network of BGI for sustainable built environment.