The Oasis Project: UHI mitigation strategies applied to Parisian schoolyards

Abstract

Paris is experimenting and implementing strategies to increase the capital's resilience and promote climate change adaptation. Major heatwaves have been hitting the French Capital lately (Bador et al., 2017) and have thus focused attention on UHI countermeasures, such as pavement-watering solutions and urban greening. The Oasis Project is one such strategy aiming to transform schoolyards into urban cool islands that would benefit surrounding neighborhoods and their inhabitants during heatwaves.The work presented here focuses on identifying high-priority schoolyards among the 670 city-owned schools. This is conducted using a GIS tool used to identify areas with high cooling potential, which would benefit most from UHI countermeasures. After extracting bare schoolyard from the facilities, we built a cooling indicator based on the ratio of high solar irradiance surface to the whole schoolyard area. We were thus able to identify 38 schoolyards with high cooling potential, 157 with medium cooling potential and 286 facilities with moderate cooling potential, out of the 670 facilities.The methodology can be applied to other cities, and therefore helps set up GIS tools that can provide municipalities with meaningful insight into their urban cooling strategy.