A sustainable cooling handbook for cities
Beating the Heat, a comprehensive handbook for sustainable cooling in cities was launched on 3 November 2021 at COP26, with contribution from the Cooling Singapore team.
As talks heat up at the COP26, cities around the world urgently need actionable knowledge and practical approaches to beat the heat. And what better way to do this than to learn from other cities?
A new guide launched on the sidelines of COP26 acts as such a resource for planners, offering an encyclopaedia of proven options to help cool cities. The guide’s 80 supporting case studies and examples of tested strategies – from Colombia to Dubai, India , Australia, Singapore and beyond – can help cities identify an approach best suited to their contexts.
The guide external page Beating the Heat: A Sustainable Cooling Handbook for Cities is published by the Cool Coalition, UNEP, RMI, Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM), Mission Innovation and Clean Cooling Collaborative
external page Assoc. Prof. Winston Chow, Principal Investigator (PI) of Cooling Singapore, and Prof. Gerhard Schmitt, former Lead PI, contributed to Chapter 6 on heat-resilient urban design and infrastructure. They introduced the concept of mitigating urban heat through urban form and planning, such as modifying building height and street orientation, as well as the effect of more sustainable mobility, such as the conversion to electric vehicles.
The Cooling Singapore leaders also share the development of the Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) to understand the impacts of various strategies on urban heat islands, by integrating environmental, land surface, industrial, traffic and building energy computational models.