As a city-state with limited land, forward planning is important to ensure that Singapore remains liveable and sustainable. Climate change effects such as rising temperatures pose a threat to our city’s liveability. To strengthen Singapore's heat resilience and combat the effects of heat stress, the public, private and academia sectors have leveraged research and innovation to design and plan for a cooler city for many generations to come.
Rising temperatures affect thermal comfort and may contribute to heat stress. Thermal comfort is the individual perception of how warm or cold the environment is and it is influenced by environmental and physiological factors, and clothing. Rising temperatures affect thermal comfort and may contribute to heat stress.
Heat stress occurs when the human body is not able to cool itself sufficiently, resulting in damage to the body caused by the buildup of excess heat. Warm and humid weather could also increase the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
Learn about strategies that can help mitigate the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and optimise thermal comfort.
By leveraging environmental modelling at a district level, planners and architects can iterate and compare different scenarios, environmental performance, and identify the trade-offs required for each plan.
For example, wind flow analysis was conducted in the planning of Jurong Lake District. This iterative process allows for planners and architects to study how different building alignments, street continuity and widths could result in different wind speeds.
We are also exploring the use of data from the Walking & Cycling Network as well as 3D datasets of buildings and trees to conduct analysis. With such insights, planners can further study the appropriate interventions that can be applied to key pedestrian routes, particularly for those that are largely unshaded throughout the day.
Step 1: Identify high usage pedestrian routes
Step 2: Filter out sheltered routes
Step 3: Filter dataset further to identify routes that are unshaded by nearby buildings throughout the day
Step 4: Study possible interventions, such as additional planting to increase vegetation cover.
A study to determine how the design of public spaces could contribute to cooler temperatures was conducted by a team comprising URA's Digital & Planning Lab and the Architecture and Urban Design Group.
UTCI stands for Universal Thermal Comfort Index, which is a measure for thermal comfort.
The study on Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in Guoco Tower, Asia Square and Marina One provided insight into how design can play a part in moderating large temperature fluctuations and reducing heat stress.
Paint companies have developed a range of cool coatings that can reduce heat absorbed by built surfaces as well as lower surface temperatures. For example, Nippon Paint’s COOL-TEC cool coatings reflects sunlight from various built surfaces, and is able to achieve a collective reduction of overall outdoor air temperature by up to 2.4˚ C. Under the Housing Development Board's Green Towns Programme, HDB and Tampines Town Council have embarked on a large-scale pilot, which will see approximately 130 HDB blocks applied with cool paint.
Tampines town centre will be the first to be retrofitted with a Distributed District Cooling (DDC) network.
Benefits of a DDC network include:
Watch to learn more:
Taking inspiration from elephants, researchers from bioSEA, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore-ETH Centre have created building tiles that aim to mimic the same cooling effect by replicating the same surface structure as elephant skins. Results show that the elephant mycelium tiles had 25% improvements to the ratio of heating/cooling rate when compared to flat tiles.
The Cooling Singapore 2.0* research team is developing a Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) which will enable policy makers to assess the impact of various heat management strategies.
Watch to learn more about DUCT’s capabilities:
*Cooling Singapore 2.0 is a multi-institutional project led by the Singapore-ETH Centre, in partnership with the Singapore Management University, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, TUMCREATE (established by the Technical University of Munich), National University of Singapore, and Cambridge CARES; and is funded by the National Research Foundation.
HDB and A*STAR collaborated to develop an Integrated Environmental Modeller (IEM) to simulate the interaction of urban micro-climatic conditions and their combined effects on the surrounding urban landscape. IEM has enabled urban planners and designers to compare different heat mitigation designs, enabling them to design housing and infrastructure with maximum thermal comfort in mind.
Watch to see how IEM is used: