Know Urban Heat Islands and ICLEI Guidelines

As usual, blogging about articles from Star Online. This is an interesting read with a negatively attractive title "Putrajaya is 5°C hotter than other local cities". The article introduced to me the term Urban Heat Island (UHI) which meant just exactly that - urban city that is always hot. The inability to reflect heat from the sun and the lack of trees to release water vapour (a process known as evapo-transpiration) to cool things down will degrade air quality and increase energy consumption due to the use of cooling equipment.
There exists now an International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) that provide guidelines to minimise on these effect:

1. Cool roofs - Use reflective roofing materials. Conventional, dark-coloured and low-sloped roofs reflect between 10 to 20% of incoming solar radiation, converting the remainder into heat absorbed by the roof.

2. Lighten streets and cool parking lots - Construct, replace, or reconstruct roads and parking lots with reflective or cool paving materials. Planting shade trees in hot spots like parking lots can reduce surface temperatures and temperatures inside parked cars.

3. Green your community - Trees placed on the west, northwest and east-facing sides of buildings significantly reduce cooling costs for a typical home or low-rise building. Preserve and increase urban tree canopies throughout the community. Replace asphalt playgrounds with green spaces to provide children with interesting, safe, and cooler places to play at school.

The six cool policies to institute the practices listed above:

1. Use cool community strategies in public buildings
2. Amend building codes to include reflective roofing standards
3. Amend landscape and development standards to include shade coverage requirements
4. Include cool community guidelines in master plans and in agreements with developers
5. Create incentives for cool action
6. Sponsor demonstration projects and contest