January 3, 2019

In this episode of ‘Why It Matters 2’, host Joshua Lim joins Professor Matthias Roth from the NUS Department of Geography on a study trip, to track the temperature across Singapore. They found that there was a sharp increase of 4°C from Lim Chu Kang to Orchard Road, despite these areas being only 30 minutes apart.

Prof Roth, who has been studying Singapore’s climate for the past 19 years, explains that this difference is due to two main mechanisms: 1) Background global warming, and, more importantly, 2) the Urban Heat Island effect, which is caused by heat trapped in buildings and heat generated from human activities. While Lim Chu Kang is an open natural area with mostly secondary rainforests and some agricultural areas, Orchard Road is surrounded by tall buildings and little vegetation, with most surfaces covered in asphalt.

In this light, Prof Roth emphasizes the importance of leaving some of Singapore’s unprotected rainforests untouched, as pockets of cool areas. In addition, he stresses that research has not really shown that ‘green’ initiatives such as adding more trees and rooftop gardens to buildings succeed in reducing the Urban Heat Island effect.

This is one of the reasons behind his research team’s ‘Cooling Singapore (CS)’ project, which aims to reduce the Urban Heat Island effect in Singapore and boost thermal comfort for all Singaporeans.

Check out the following video to learn more about how rising temperatures affect us all: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/video-on-demand/why-it-matters/killer-heat-11066392?fbclid=IwAR2bcls1X22RS_C86be2_pNLNgrFZ3RQIjr0O_v5fmKIgFuxbLo43blBgAM