Urbanization-driven secondary climatic changes: Re-envisioning response of fast growing cities of Northern India

Abstract

Urbanization and climatic changes are concomitant to each other. Urbanization induces climate change through enhanced greenhouse gas emissions, industrial processes, and energy consumptions. In developing countries like India, with the increase in population and change in lifestyle, there has been substantial rise in demand and use of energy and fuel, which consequently leads to conversion of agricultural land to built up area. This leads to rise in land surface temperature (LST) and adversely impact the micro-climate of a region in close vicinity of urban entities. The present study aims to analyze the association between built-up, green cover and land surface temperature for selected cities and corresponding districts i.e. Amritsar, Jalandhar, and Ludhiana of Punjab State, India, the main contributors to green revolution. Adopting remote sensing based approach, district-level analysis of the normalized differential built-up index (NDBI), normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST) was carried out using Landsat 5 for the years 1990, 1999 and 2009, and Landsat 8 (OLI/TIRS) for 2019. To analyze the relationship between built-up and green cover with LST, correlation analysis was carried out indicating (a) alarming rising trend of built-up is 1.72 % in Amritsar, 2.99 % in Jalandhar and 3.3 % in Ludhiana (b) relatively higher temperature in core and the peri-urban built-up areas generate warmer surface temperatures than the surroundings (c) reduced area under agricultural land and (d) rising stress on water bodies.