Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
He manages the national climate change vulnerability studies. These include the management of water resources, biodiversity and urban infrastructures and planning amongst others. To strengthen Singapore?s resilience to the impact of climate change, he is leading the development of a common geospatial platform for the management and sharing of data and information, multi-scale and multi-disciplinary modeling and simulation tools to support vulnerability and adaptation studies in Singapore.Abstract
Climate Change Information System for Urban Heat Island Effect for Urban Planning: A Singapore Case StudyThe IPCC Climate Change Assessment Reports recognised the potential impacts of climate change on cities. With global warming, an increased frequency of heat waves and severity will certainly amplify the current problems associated with urban heat island (UHI) effects in a highly urban environment with densely aggregated, tall buildings. Climate change is an issue that will increasingly require knowledge and information at the local scale. The availability of high-resolution geospatial data, monitoring of land, coastal and water resources and high-resolution environmental modelling at local scales is able to support timely and reliable climate-sensitive urban planning. A well-formulated cyber-infrastructure design, incorporating recent advances in informatics and geographic information systems (GIS), is essential for the success of climate-sensitive urban planning efforts to track and adapt to a changing climate and changing environments. The study will demonstrate the use of GIS as integrative platforms for urban planning, based on coupled atmospheric and urban model and geospatial information, to facilitate the analysis and simulation of UHI in highly urbanized Singapore. The system will enable visualisation of geo-located/geo-referenced climate change information with layers that contain important infrastructure location and demographic data such as transport infrastructure. The overlay information will include highly specific and high resolution data to help government agencies to plan ahead and make informed decisions for mitigation planning for UHI and global warming and as well as environmental changes due to further intensification of urban developments in Singapore.