Urban Vegetation, Urban Heat Islands and Heat Vulnerability Assessment in Melbourne, 2018

DELWP has worked in partnership with RMIT University, CSIRO, and the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes (CAUL) Hub of the National Environmental Science Program to map and analyse vegetation, land use, and urban heat across Melbourne. The project delivers an important component of the ‘Cooling and Greening Melbourne’ work program (Action 91) of Plan Melbourne 2017-2050 and will support the creation and expansion of urban forests and cooling measures throughout metropolitan Melbourne. It will also enable DELWP to track progress towards a cooler and greener city. This report is part of a series of reports produced by DELWP in partnership with RMIT University, which provide an overview of the vegetation cover and urban heat data for metropolitan Melbourne. This report provides a statistical analysis of the relationship between urban vegetation cover and urban heat island effect (UHI) in Melbourne metropolitan area, based on 2018 vegetation cover and land surface temperature data. Both the vegetation and UHI data were attributed to ABS 2016 census Mesh Blocks. This report also presents a heat vulnerability assessment at the SA1 (Statistical Area 1) level, making use of 2016 Census data along with the 2018 vegetation cover and land surface temperature data. The report provides an updated assessment of the relationship between UHI and vegetation cover, and an updated HVI, from the previously submitted interim report based on 2014 vegetation cover and land surface temperature data (Sun et al., 2018). The 2014 and 2018 temperature analysis are not directly compared in this project, as land surface temperature derived from Landsat thermal images is subject to the availability of satellite images, which causes significant annual variation between two different years due to climatic factors which are difficult to control for.