Rising climate hazards in urban areas, driven by global climate change and intensified by urbanization, are increasing extreme thermal stress, posing significant risks to thermal comfort and socioeconomic well-being. This study projects high-resolution future urban climate and thermal stress for 2050 under the SSP370 scenario, a high-emission, low-mitigation pathway from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). In this research, hourly 1.5 × 1.5-km projections of meteorology and Universal Temperature Climate factor (UTCI) were generated, incorporating urbanization effects (future urban morphology and anthropogenic heat emissions change) across three major cities: Tokyo, Cairo, and Jakarta. Under SSP370, both UTCI and air temperature increase substantially across all cities, with UTCI showing stronger responses. Urban change effects vary distinctly across cities: Tokyo shows cooling due to reduced anthropogenic heat emissions, with air temperature responding more strongly than UTCI, while Cairo and Jakarta experience warming from continued urban development. Despite these differences, the magnitudes of urban change effects are inversely correlated with background temperature across all cities. Analysis of feature importance through machine-learning reveals that urban change-induced UTCI responses are radiation-dominated in Tokyo and Cairo, contrasting with ventilation-dominated responses in humid Jakarta.
JIN et al. (Thu,) studied this question.