Elsevier

Habitat International

Volume 86, April 2019, Pages 28-37
Habitat International

A qualitative exploration on the awareness and knowledge of stakeholders towards Urban Heat Island phenomenon in Greater Kuala Lumpur: Critical insights for urban policy implications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2019.02.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • UHI is poorly addressed, communicated and integrated into local urban policies.

  • Results demonstrated a variable lack of awareness and knowledge towards UHI amongst the stakeholders.

  • Impactful insights and recommendations for awareness creation and evidence-based urban policy formulation are provided.

Abstract

Despite its notable role in the exacerbation of urban climate, Urban Heat Island (UHI) was poorly addressed, communicated and integrated into local urban policies of many developing countries. Such scenario often queried the level of UHI understanding amongst the key players who were involved in urban policy formulation. Hence, a qualitative study using Focus Group Discussions (FGD) was designed to investigate the awareness and knowledge level of stakeholders such as policy makers and practitioners in Greater Kuala Lumpur (GKL), an expanding socio-economic hub of a developing tropical country. The findings demonstrated a variable lack of awareness and knowledge about the concept of UHI, its status in GKL as well as organizational engagement in adaptation and mitigation initiatives among the study participants. Essentially, policy makers illustrated a facile awareness and knowledge towards UHI issues whereas practitioners displayed a more robust portfolio of factual understanding regarding the corresponding issues. In line with National Urbanization Policy's (NUP) aspiration to optimize urban developments that provide high quality of life, this study sheds some light on the exigency for UHI awareness creation and capacity building among the policy makers. This study also provides impactful prepositions for the articulation of necessary actions towards evidence-based urban policy formulation in future.

Introduction

Starting from the onset of the Anthropocene, environmentalists have demonstrated that manmade modifications to the earth's surface induced inadvertent impacts on regional climate (Bhati & Mohan, 2016; Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015). In particular, many burgeoning urban areas have long been observed to record positive air temperature anomalies in contrast to their rural fringes, which is later described as Urban Heat Islands (UHIs) (Półrolniczak, Kolendowicz, Majkowska, & Czernecki, 2017; Wong & Lau, 2013). The driving mechanism of UHI is deemed to be biophysical in nature due to urban-rural pair differences that influence sensible heat dissipation and convection efficiency, sunlight reflection, artificial heating and evaporative cooling (Cao et al., 2016). This phenomenon is now prevalent in many developing cities that function as the main intellectual and economic capitals. It is often catalysed by escalating development activities that progressively replaced natural surfaces with materials of high thermal properties (Santamouris, 2015). Accordingly, impermeable surfaces with low albedo and high admittance, decreased evapotranspiration and shade due to reduced vegetation cover, large urban canyons that modify wind flows, heavy traffic activities, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system as well as anthropogenic activities in the urban areas are the primary contributors to the UHI phenomenon (Santamouris, 2014; Wang, Berardi, & Akbari, 2016). Consequently, this situation has increased the importance of urban sustainability and placed an immense pressure on discovering ways to manage the trade-off between urban sustainability and infrastructure developments. In the extreme, many global cities in different climate zones have recorded short-term temperature deviations in excess of 5 °C (London) (Tomlinson, Chapman, Thornes, & Baker, 2012), 12 °C (Tokyo) (Tran, Uchihama, Ochi, & Yasuoka, 2006) and 5.5 °C (Singapore) (Jusuf, Wong, Hagen, Anggoro, & Hong, 2007) using satellite-derived temperature datasets. Notably, Greater Kuala Lumpur (GKL), a developing tropical city of Malaysia suffered inevitable territorial urban development that manifested into formation of severe UHIs with an average gain in surface temperature of 8.47 °C between 1997 and 2013 (Yusuf, Pradhan, & Idrees, 2014). In an attempt to evaluate thermal effects of unshaded courtyards in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Ghaffarianhoseini, Berardi, and Ghaffarianhoseini (2015) identified that the existing orientation and design of courtyards are thermally uncomfortable due to excessive solar exposure. In the long run, escalating trend of urban temperature in such cities due to unsustainable developments would become a barrier to the creation of sustainable cities and communities, one of the key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set at United Nations General Assembly in 2015 (United Nations, 2015).

As Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underlines, high UHI magnitudes allied with intense urbanization would impose a substantially larger impact on the elevation of globally averaged land surface temperature trends in the near future (Huang & Lu, 2015). Depending on the intensity, UHI tends to display motley of social, economic and environmental implications that provide deleterious impacts to the proximate society and environment (Buchin, Hoelscher, Meier, Nehls, & Ziegler, 2016; Phelan et al., 2015). A plethora of studies in both developed and developing countries extensively assessed the genesis, causative factors and mitigation of UHI via in-situ investigations (Konstantinov, Varentsov, & Esau, 2018; Ramakreshnan et al., 2018, Ramakreshnan et al., 2018), satellite applications (Li et al., 2016; Mathew, Khandelwal, & Kaul, 2016) as well as numerical and physical models (Murata, Sasaki, Hanafusa, & Kurihara, 2013; Razzaghmanesh, Beecham, & Salemi, 2016; Wang & Akbari, 2016; Wang et al., 2016). Additionally, a handful of other studies have also evaluated the exasperating impacts of UHI in exacerbating heat waves (Zhao et al., 2018), deteriorating regional air quality (Aslam, Krishna, Beig, Tinmaker, & Chate, 2017; Li et al., 2018), inducing extreme weather events (Emmanuel & Kruger, 2012; Ramamurthy & Sangobanwo, 2016), increasing building energy consumptions (Kolokotroni, Ren, Davies, & Mavrogianni, 2012; Magli, Lodi, Lombroso, Muscio, & Teggi, 2015) and aggravating outdoor thermal comfort levels of urbanites (Qaid, Bin Lamit, Ossen, & Shahminan, 2016; Taleghani & Berardi, 2018). However, the extent to which this research-based knowledge has reached various stakeholders and has been translated into awareness creation programs remains a grey zone.

To date, exploration of stakeholders' awareness and knowledge on UHI and its causative factors is finite to the realm of qualitative studies. Even though abundant research evidences reviewed the use of green roofs, vegetation, albedo, emissivity, modification of urban designs and pavement materials (Akbari & Kolokotsa, 2016; Gago, Roldan, Pacheco-Torres, & Ordonez, 2013; Memon, Dennis, & Liu, 2008; Phelan et al., 2015; Wong & Lau, 2013) as viable heat mitigations, their incorporation into urban policies is still entirely dependent on policy makers’ awareness and knowledge levels about the severity of this issue. Indeed, a holistic understanding of UHI phenomenon is imperative for the key stakeholders, especially policy makers, to devise effectual policies that promote constructive interventions, adaptations and mitigation practices for the improvement of urban liveability and environmental stewardship. In reality, the incorporation of UHI in local development policies and national agendas of many tropical countries seems to be scanty due to lack of UHI awareness among policy makers themselves (Ramakreshnan et al., 2018, Ramakreshnan et al., 2018). Consequently, contemporary development policies in such countries appear to oscillate between economic and environmental gains with the aim of finding a balance between them. In this scenario, local governance faces tremendous challenges in reconciling the needs for the creation of climate resilient and liveable cities in the midst of intense urban transformation activities in accordance to their national agendas.

In Malaysia, National Urbanization Policies 1 & 2 (NUP 1 & 2) succinctly elucidated the need to accelerate climate compatible urban developments that play optimal role as the engine of economic growth without undermining the sustainability of urban communities. Furthermore, there are many urban policies such as National Physical Plans, State Structure Plan, Local Plan, Special Area Plan as well as various guidelines and acts to guide and coordinate urbanization process with an emphasis of maintaining the balance between social, economic and physical developments within the country (PLANMalaysia, 2018). Nevertheless, none of the urban policies seems to implicitly address the issues associated with UHI except for several statements in NUP 1 and NUP 2. In NUP 1, the 26-th policy addresses developments that minimize UHI impacts as a viable measure to create conducive liveable urban environment (PLANMalaysia, 2006). On the other hand, NUP 2 elaborates vertical and rooftop gardening as a potential strategy to reduce urban warming impacts in the city centres (PLANMalaysia, 2016). However, these policies address UHI issues on the surface and their implementation is still meagre. As a result, UHI phenomenon is still not widely addressed and incorporated into many existing local urban policies.

This scenario invoked questions on the policy makers' awareness regarding the issue. Due to the relative scarcity of qualitative inquiries on stakeholders' awareness in UHI literature, this study was conducted to explore the awareness and knowledge level of stakeholders, which can be further categorized into two groups as policy makers and practitioners, who actively involved in the making and/or executing policies related to urban developments in GKL, Malaysia. The outcomes of this study would serve as a primary step in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the policy makers and other related stakeholders' awareness and knowledge on UHI in a developing country such as Malaysia. In addition, this study would provide insights and information to many local departments to devise necessary actions and educational campaigns to create UHI awareness among the policy makers prior to their involvement in evidence-based urban policy formulation. It is noteworthy that all the legitimate interpretations of political relevance from these FGDs were mainly derived and discussed by combining a wide-array of policy makers’ viewpoints with expert knowledge.

Section snippets

Materials and method

In this study, Focus Group Discussions (FGD) were used to acquire the required subjective information on policy makers and other related stakeholders' awareness and knowledge of UHI, its status in GKL as well as their organization's engagement in adaptation and mitigation practices. FGD was deemed the best methodology to study social or professional representations in greater depth with higher degree of spontaneity as it expresses dimensions of understanding that often remain inaccessible by

Participant demographics

Two FGDs with six to eight participants in each group were conducted on 15 March 2016 in a public university in western Malaysia. The participants were between the ages of 31 and 57 years old with the mean age of 41.9 years. In terms of academic qualifications, all the participants had completed tertiary education in their respective fields. Table 2 summarizes the socio-demographic attributes of the participants who contributed an array of diversified inputs on all the aspects discussed during

Discussion

In general, this study evaluated the awareness and knowledge associated to UHI in GKL among a group of carefully selected participants that can be further categorized into two distinct groups, namely policy makers and practitioners. The findings revealed a variable lack of awareness and knowledge about the concept of UHI, its status in GKL as well as organizational involvement in adaptation and mitigation practices among the study participants. In particular, urban policy makers displayed a

Conclusion and recommendations

In brief, this study presented a comprehensive visualization of the awareness and knowledge regarding UHI in GKL among the study participants that can be further grouped as policy makers and practitioners. Eventually, it elucidates the following key concluding remarks. Policy makers illustrated a very shallow awareness and knowledge towards UHI issues whereas practitioners displayed a more robust portfolio of factual understanding regarding the corresponding issues. UHI was poorly addressed and

Limitations of the study

In general, this study was subjected to the inherent limitations of any qualitative study and the following aspects need to be considered when interpreting the findings. The purposive sampling to draw the samples in this study may result in selection biases. Hence, the sample may not be broadly representative of all Malaysians. In fact, smaller numbers of group discussions that may evoke speculative and subjective interpretations of the findings can be compensated by increasing the number of

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to appreciate the time and willingness of participants to share their views on all the aspects being discussed in this study. At the same time, gratitude extended to University of Malaya for financially assisting this study via University of Malaya Grand Challenges Research Grants (GC002-15SUS).

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