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Local meteorological data and data from an Eddy Covariance flux tower installed in the city center are used for the model simulation and evaluation. The Surface Urban Energy and Water balance Scheme (SUEWS) is used to quantify the impact of NBS in the city of Heraklion, Crete, Greece, a densely built urban area. The present paper aims to study the impact of Nature Based Solutions (NBS) on the urban environment. This study provides a valuable reference for decision makers for urban planning and provides an approach to help prioritise management decisions for the development of heat resilient and sustainable cities. For the 2050s, enhanced levels of heat risk under the RCP 8.5 scenario are particularly visible in the core city centre and in the northern and western suburbs. Between the 2020s and 2050s, urban areas considered at highest risk are expected to increase by about 70% and 96% under RCP 4.5 and 8.5 respectively. This allowed the derivation of an improved hazard indicator in terms of extreme heat stress which, when integrated with information on current levels of vulnerability (i.e., socioeconomic factors assessed using principal component analysis (PCA), provides a heat hazard risk index for Dublin city at a fine spatial scale. In order to consider the interactions between greenhouse gas emissions and urban expansion, a climate-based urban land cover classification and a simple climate model have been combined to compute air temperature values accounting for urban heat island effect. This study proposes an extreme heat stress risk index for Dublin city across multiple decades (2020s-2050s) and for two representative concentration pathways (RCPs).
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New spatially explicit approaches that identify highly exposed and vulnerable areas are needed to inform current urban planning practices to cope with heat hazards. Populations in high-density urban areas are exposed to higher levels of heat stress in comparison to rural areas. Similarly, recent studies for other cities have assessed heat risk at the neighbourhood level in densely populated areas (Maragno et al., 2020 Savić et al., 2018 Verdonck et al., 2019) and some of these have evaluated the impact of urban expansion in terms of Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP, Working Groups I II III and IPCC, 2014) scenarios and Local Climate Zones (LCZ) for current and future periods (e.g., in Brussels city, Verdonck et al., 2019). Recently some authors have focussed on the nexus between urban land cover and land surface temperature in Dublin city and neighbouring urban areas across multiple years (Alexander et al., 2017(Alexander et al.,, 2016 Alexander et al., 2015aAlexander et al.,, 2015b. Indeed, while there are many examples of risk assessments for cities in relation to climate change, most of these studies do not integrate future land cover configurations into their analysis as a measure of enhanced exposure to climate risk as a result of the UHI effect.