About Cooling Singapore

Like many other cities in the world, Singapore faces a problem of high temperatures arising from a combination of:

• The urban heat island (UHI) effect, which can be in excess of 7˚C between urban and rural areas in Singapore.
• Greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change that affects long-term mean temperatures + 1.4 to 4.6˚C by 2100.

For Singapore, being a large and densely populated city in the tropics where it is already hot and humid, further increasing temperatures will be detrimental to its population, economy, and ecosystems.

The Cooling Singapore 2.0 research project aims to build a Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) for Singapore by integrating all relevant computational models (environmental, land surface, industrial, traffic, building energy) as well as regional- and micro-scale climate models used in previous UHI and outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) research. The project team will work closely with relevant government agencies to use DUCT to evaluate quantitatively robust scenarios for UHI and OTC analysis, and address questions such as:

• What is the impact of future urban development on the urban climate?
• How can urban heat in Singapore be effectively mitigated?
  
• What is the relationship between major anthropogenic heat sources and the urban climate?
  
• What differences are there in mitigation approaches between the larger-scale UHI effect, and smaller scale OTC issues in Singapore?
  

Acknowledgements: This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its ‘Cooling Singapore 2.0 Funding Initiative’.

Cooling Singapore 2.0 builds on the results of previous research projects Cooling Singapore 1.0 and Cooling Singapore 1.5. In Cooling Singapore 1.0 (2017-2018), the project team selected suitable metrics and tools to assess the UHI and OTC, developed a catalogue of potential heat mitigation measures, and identified knowledge and technology gaps to guide future R&D activities. In Cooling Singapore 1.5 (2019-2020), the project team assessed and measured potential cooling strategies, created a decision support system to assess the OTC of various strategies, and developed climate-responsive urban design guidelines for Singapore.