SUGS - Sustainable water management of urban green spaces for resilience to heatwaves

This project aims to promote the sustainable use of water for urban green spaces during heatwaves and water scarcity restrictions to maintain green spaces as efficient and effective nature-based solutions for urban heat resilience. Increasing heatwave frequency and intensity will result in increased cooling energy consumption and mortality rates, and loss of worker productivity, which impose an additional burden on the economy. The development of effective green spaces for heatwave resilience requires sustainable water use planning and careful management, especially in arid and semiarid regions where irrigation is a key factor to save plants and produce cooling. Improving water efficiency by reducing irrigation without decreasing cooling effects is challenging. The success of this proposal contributes to water conservation and improved thermal comfort under heatwaves in the framework of UN SDG 3, 6, 11 and 13, and European Green Deal. In this project, the management strategy of deficit irrigation will be applied to maximise the productivity of applied water by optimising the trade-off between thermal comfort and irrigation. Estimation of water requirement of urban green spaces is difficult because of the heterogeneous nature of plants, small and isolated individual green spaces and the presence of various microclimates. The lack of approaches addressing all these factors has increased the gap between the irrigation water application and real water demand. This project will use the 3D micro-scale model ENVI-met to estimate ET, water loss from the processes of evaporation and transpiration. The results will be evaluated against on-site measurements in four green spaces. The effects of heatwave and water shortage on cooling of green spaces and thermal comfort will be estimated. By validating and developing ENVI-met for ET estimations based on real environmental conditions, this study will greatly advance decision support tools for nature-based resilience to heatwaves.