Supervisors: Dr Negin Nazarian (n.nazarian@unsw.edu.au), A. Prof Melissa Hart (melissa.hart@unsw.edu.au)
This project aims to quantify the disproportionate exposure to urban heat intensity across major Australian cities. Urban heat stress poses a major risk to the health and wellbeing of urban dwellers. Case studies of individual cities suggest that environmental stressors such as urban heat may be unequally distributed across income groups. This project aims to quantify this disparity for Australian cities by combining crowdsourced air temperature measurements with high-resolution urban data for vegetation, surface cover, and distance from the coast. Urban heat analyses will then be combined with property valuation and income level such that we better quantify urban climate injustice embedded in gaps for measurements. This multi-disciplinary data analysis can inform interventions in both climatological observations and policies for addressing environmental inequalities, particularly as they pertain to future urban climate change in Australian cities.
To apply: the Undergraduate Scholarship application form can be found here