Croucher Advanced Study Institute on “Changing Urban Climate and the Impact on Urban Thermal Environment and Urban Living” and WUDAPT Workshop was held successfully in CUHK during 7–13 December

Sponsored by the Croucher Foundation, Prof Edward Ng and Prof Chao Ren led the team to host the Croucher Advanced Study Institute on “Changing Urban Climate and the Impact on Urban Thermal Environment and Urban Living” during 7–11 December to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge and academic exchange on the themes of urban climate and urban thermal comfort. More than 100 academics, scientists and PhD students in urban climatology and environmental design, as well as some stakeholders like government officials working on climate research and sustainable urban design participated in this 5 days programme. Croucher ASI invited worldwide renowned lecturers included Prof. Alex Mahalov, Arizona State University; Prof. James Voogt, the President of International Association for Urban Climate; Prof. Darren Robinson, University of Nottingham; Dr. Fei Chen, National Center for Atmospheric Research; Prof. Janet Barlow, University of Reading; Prof. Richard de Dear, University of Sydney; Prof. Akashi Mochida, Tohoku University; Prof. Ryozo Ooka, University of Tokyo; and Prof. David Pearlmutter, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The topics covered in the lectures included urban heat islands, urban climate and urban sustainability, urban ventilation on building and city scale, greening and health risk, pedestrian thermal stress, urban environmental risk under future climate change, having an in-depth discussion on the climate change issues and its impacts from urban living environment to human comfort and well-being, introducing general concepts, modelling and applications on urban climate.

At the closing ceremony of the Croucher ASI, Prof. Joseph Sung, Vice-Chancellor and President of CUHK, gave his closing remarks in addressing the efforts and the role of CUHK on the education and research related to sustainability and environmental issues, and looking ahead to develop further international initiative and collaboration with worldwide partnerships to contribute to the global issues of climate change and environmental risk in the future. 

After ASI, a two-day workshops on World Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (WUDAPT) organized by CUHK, University College Dublin, the University of North Carolina and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis was held on 12–13 December 2015 in CUHK. The workshop introduced the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification scheme, and especially the protocol and the initial development of WUDAPT initiative. More than 45 attendees was trained in developing new database for selected cities in China, and discuss the way forward on the WUDAPT database.