Locating Urban Heat Stress Vulnerability: A GIS-based Spatial Cluster Analysis of Urban Heat Load, the Elderly and Accessibility of Urban Green Spaces

Abstract

Urban parks provide important ecosystem services, for instance curbing urban heating by the cooling effect of evapotranspiration and shading. As elderly people constitute a group of citizens who are particularly vulnerable to urban heating, the accessibility of urban parks is of special interest for this target group. For Salzburg City, we aggregated to census tracts (Zählsprengel) (1) the near-future average annual sum of summer days, as modelled by the Austrian national weather service, (2) the walking distances to urban parks as calculated by GIS-based network analysis, and (3) the proportion of citizens who are more than 65 years old. Using geostatistical cluster analysis, areas were identified which comprised a combination of high urban heating risk, a high proportion of elderly people, and low accessibility to urban parks. The case study showed that the methodology is suitable for identifying contiguous and homogeneous areas of interest to which targeted planning strategies for climate adaptation can be applied, especially if the spatial resolution is increased by microscale demographic data. Keywords: