Climate-informed decision-making for urban design: Assessing the impact of urban morphology on urban heat island.

Urban growth is related to major environmental consequences and affects people's livability and economy. To address such impacts, stakeholders must evaluate different mitigation policies. Due to the complexity of those phenomena, such comparison process can be challenging, resulting in subjective and unclear interpretations, which consequentially limits the course of action for its implementation. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a novel framework that provides a statistical analysis of urban climate models. The high-dimensional data generated by the climate model is transformed into a low-dimensional scoring system, according to statistical metrics that reflect desired priorities of stakeholders. This allows for informed quantification of the quality of different scenarios by policy makers. We illustrate the applicability of the framework in an urban area of Singapore. Different urban morphologies are analysed, estimating their environmental impact on Urban Heat Island and their potential for population allocation, while considering operational energy costs. The result is a matrix of scores per scenario, highlighting the optimal design according to the pre-defined metrics. The scenarios with the highest building height (81 m) and medium (40%) or low (30%) density offer a good balance between the environmental impact and its external trade-offs, evaluated by the number of people allocated per site area and the cost of energy to operate the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]