Cities In South Have Far Less Green Space Than Global North Cities: Study

WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A recent study using NASA satellite data to identify a major gap in global resilience to climate change has found that cities in the southern hemisphere have far lesser green space and therefore lesser cooling capacity than cities in the Global North.

'Cities can strategically prioritize developing new green spaces in areas that have less green space,' said Christian Braneon, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York who was not affiliated with this study. 'Satellite data can be really helpful for this.'

An international team of researchers led by Yuxiang Li, a doctoral student at Nanjing University, analyzed the 500 largest cities in the world to compare their cooling capacities. They used data from the Landsat 8 satellite, jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, to determine how effective green space was at cooling each city.

Researchers found that cities in the Global South have just 70 percent of the greenery-related cooling capacity of cities in the Global North. The green spaces in an average Global South city cool the temperature by about 4.5 F (2.5 C). In an average Global North city, that cooling capacity is 6.5 F (3.6 C). This compounds an existing problem: cities in the South tend to be at lower latitudes (that is, nearer to the Equator), which are predicted to see more heat extremes in the coming years.

'It's already clear that Global South countries will be impacted by heat waves, rising temperatures, and climatic extremes more than their Global North counterparts,' said Chi Xu, a professor of ecology at Nanjing University and a co-author of the study. The Global South has less capacity to adapt to heat because air conditioning is less common and power outages are more frequent.

North Carolina's Charlotte has been regarded as the best-performing green city, while Somalian capital Mogadishu has been recorded as the worst-performing city in the study, published in Nature Communications.

Cities tend to be hotter than nearby rural areas because of the urban heat island effect.

The terms Global North and Global South were used in the study to distinguish developed countries - mostly in the Northern Hemisphere - from developing nations - mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, NASA said in a press release.

Copyright(c) 2024 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved

Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX