Cooling Singapore 2.0
Developing solutions to address the urban heat challenge in Singapore
Singapore has become warmer as a result of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global climate change. As a densely populated city state in the tropics, Singapore’s population, economy, and ecosystems are vulnerable to the negative impacts of further temperature increase.
Tackling such a complex issue, with implications for planning, energy, transportation, building, and patterns of consumption, must be based upon sound scientific knowledge, in partnership with governmental and industry stakeholders.
The interdisciplinary Cooling Singapore project aims to mitigate the UHI effect by furthering the scientific knowledge required for climate-sensitive design of the urban environment. The team seeks not only to improve residents’ comfort level outdoors, but ultimately, also to improve liveability and well-being of residents, and sustainability of Singapore as a whole.
In the current phase, the team will develop an island-wide digital urban climate twin (DUCT) of Singapore by integrating relevant computational models (environmental, land surface, industrial, traffic, building energy) as well as regional- and micro-scale climate models.
Building on work done in the earlier phase, the team will work closely with government agencies to explore heat effects of buildings, transport and industry. Finally, they will produce a set of climate-informed urban design guidelines based on research findings as a resource to planners and agencies.
The multi-institutional project is led by the Singapore-ETH Centre, in partnership with the Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), TUMCREATE (Established by the Technical University of Munich), National University of Singapore (NUS), and Cambridge CARES.
CARES and Cooling Singapore 2.0
CARES’ contribution to the project focused on estimating anthropogenic heat emissions from industrial activities in Jurong Island and various industries across mainland Singapore. The initial phase comprised of developing semantic energy models using The World Avatar™ to assess heat emissions from Jurong Island, feeding these results into DUCT. Sensitivity analyses were also conducted to investigate the impact of these emissions on the weather in Singapore. As part of the project extension, CARES expanded its scope to estimate energy consumption and heat emissions from industries in mainland Singapore. The energy consumption data was used to create representative inputs for City Energy Analyst (CEA) simulations and the heat emissions data was used to study the effect of industrial heat emissions on mainland temperatures using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) module within DUCT.
This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme.