Professor Kangning Huang Received Google Award for Inclusion Research Program

Professor Kangning Huang from Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urban Design and Urban Science received Google Award for Inclusion (AIR) Program. Launched in 2020, the Award for Inclusion Research Program is an ongoing effort to recognize innovative research and professors working to create positive societal impact. The Award for Inclusion Research Program supports academic research in computing and technology that addresses the needs of historically marginalized groups globally.

The research Professor Huang proposed is on Future Heat Extremes in China’s Urban Slums: Projections and Mitigations. Inhabited by the most vulnerable populations, urban slums tend to have unique morphologies–like the deep urban canyons–that can exacerbate urban warming. However, despite a growing interest in studying urban-scale climate change, urban slums’ unique morphologies and building materials are often not modeled in climate change projections. The unknown future heat stress in urban slums–due to the lack of representations in climate change models–is particularly burdensome on the slum dwellers in China. Accounting for 25% of the country’s urban population, dwellers in China’s slums are often low-income rural migrant workers lacking adequate access to healthcare and thus are more vulnerable to the health risks caused by heat extremes. This project aims to answer the important question of: how will the heat extremes in China’s urban slums change in the future due to rapid urbanization and climate change? Surveys in urban slums across different climate zones in China will be conducted to gather the parameters (e.g. building heights, street widths, and thermal properties) needed in modeling slums in climate change projections. Then, an urban land use change model and a regional climate model will be integrated to project how much future urbanization and climate change will exacerbate heat extremes in slums. Finally, two heat mitigation measures–increasing green space and installing white roofs–will be simulated in the integrated urban slums climate change model, in order to compare their effectiveness in reducing population exposure to extreme heat conditions.

Professor Huang hopes this research can build a database of the morphologies and building materials of urban slums as the inputs to climate models, forecast the heat extremes in urban slums due to future urbanization and climate change, evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different heat mitigation measures like increasing green spaces and installing white roofs.