Street trees and urban heat island in Glasgow: mitigation through the ‘Avenues Programme’

Glasgow, Scotland, is embarking on an ambitious plan to convert all city centre thoroughfares into tree-lined streets (the ‘Avenues Programme’) to make the city centre more people-friendly, attractive, greener, sustainable and economically competitive. While it is well-known that urban green infrastructure (UGI) is a promising strategy to address overheating in urban areas, evidence for the surface temperature, air temperature and thermal comfort effects of street trees is contradictory. In the context of a city-centre-wide ‘Avenues Programme’ in Glasgow, we explore its co-benefits in terms of temperature and thermal comfort. We used a multi-method approach, combining GIS-based spatial analysis with fieldwork, microclimate modelling and statistical analysis to determine the scale of the overheating problem and the likely role of its mitigation based on the ‘Avenues Programme’ case study. We show that the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) differences within the city are of the same magnitude as the urban-rural anomaly and “hot” spots are localized in the city centre area and are clustered in different patterns depending on the severity of background temperatures. Therefore, small, isolated patches of vegetation would not be effective for cooling the clusters of overheated areas. Air temperature showed non-linear relationship with tree canopy cover and the relationship is stronger at medium scale. The ‘Avenues Programme’ as a whole, could eliminate the UHI effect in the city centre, with some tree species completely eliminating the UHI in the city centre. Once complete, the ‘Avenues Programme’ could significantly improve thermal comfort during heatwaves from the current ‘hot’ category to ‘slightly warm’ across the city centre.