Natural-anthropogenic environment interactively causes the surface urban heat island intensity variations in global climate zones.

The inconstant climate change and rapid urbanization substantially disturb the global thermal balance and induce severe urban heat island (UHI) effect, adversely impacting human development and health. Existing literature has revealed the UHI characteristics and driving factors at an urban scale, but interactions between the main factors of a global grid scale assessment on the context of climate zones remain unclear. Therefore, based on the multidimensional climatic and socio-economic statistical datasets, the multi-time scale of surface urban heat island intensity (SUHI) characteristics was investigated in this study to analyze how natural-anthropogenic drivers affect the variance of SUHI and vary in their importance for the changes of other interaction factors.

A synthetic water-heat-vegetation biodiversity nexus approach to assess coastal vulnerability in eastern China.

Climate change pressure and biodiversity degradation in coastal regions have caused an increase in urban vulnerability. Current coastal vulnerability studies fail to consider the interactions among the perturbations. Increases in such interactions contribute to the indeterminate changes in the ecosystem productivity and impact on human well-being.

The influence of local background climate on the dominant factors and threshold-size of the cooling effect of urban parks.

Urban parks can mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) by creating microclimates that lower in temperature than their surroundings, which are known as park cooling effect (PCE). The local background climate has a significant impact on the PCE, however the dominant factors and threshold value of efficiency (TVoE) of the PCE under different local background climates are still uncertain. Here, we selected 207 urban parks in 27 cities in East China with four different local background climates, warm temperate sub-humid monsoon (WTC), northern subtropical sub-humid monsoon (NSC), northern subtropical humid monsoon (NHC), and middle subtropical humid monsoon climate (MSC), for comparative studies.

Health risk assessment of heavy metal(loid)s in park soils of the largest megacity in China by using Monte Carlo simulation coupled with Positive matrix factorization model.

Urban Parks are important places for residents to engage in outdoor activities, and whether heavy metal(loid)s (HMs) in park soils are harmful to human health has aroused people's concern. A total of 204 topsoil samples containing nine HMs were collected from 78 urban parks of Shanghai in China, and used to assess the health risks caused by HMs in soils. The results revealed that the Hg, Cd and Pb were the main enriched pollutants and posed higher ecological risks than the other HMs.