R. Emmanuel

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Verified

R. verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• BSc (Built Env.), MSc (Arch.), MS, PhD, FIA, RIBA
• Director at Glasgow Caledonian University

Smart cities are widely regarded as a promising solution to urbanization challenges; however, environmental aspects such as outdoor thermal comfort and urban heat island are often less addressed than social and economic dimensions of sustainability. To address this gap, we developed and evaluated an affordable, scalable, and cost-effective weather...

Purpose Air pollution and air quality are key environmental factors that impact an investor’s willingness to pay (WTP) and are negatively correlated. Hedonic pricing quantifies the relationship between air pollutants and property values but is a backward-looking tool. Similarly, limited research links investment potential to urban planning and air...

Cities face increasing heat risk due to global and local warming, and the risk is greater in the developing world. South Asia, in particular, faces increasing urban climate risk, but the translation of urban climate knowledge into sustainable climate-sensitive planning is weak. In this paper, we report on our conversations with experts from the Sri...

Ankur Negi presented his research titled "Mitigating Heat Risk to Improve Urban Resilience to Climate Change in Finnish Cities" at the event "A Step Towards Sustainability" held on April 23 in Huelva as part of the Sustainable Horizons Project, SHEs. Ankur Negi is a professional in urban climate and disaster management, currently pursuing a Master...

Shade plays a crucial role in creating liveable outdoor spaces in hot arid cities. Numerous studies have been conducted to understand the relationship between human behaviour and built form and how the physical environment responds to human needs and reflects social values. However, there have been limited reviews of the relationship between solar...

This study delves into Green Infrastructure (GI) planning in Brindisi, Italy, evaluating its influence on urban air quality and thermal comfort. Employing an LCZ-centered Geographic Information System (GIS)-based classification protocol, the prevalence of LCZ 6 (Open low-rise) and LCZ 2 (Compact mid-rise) is highlighted. Despite generally low PM10...

South Asian countries have been increasingly affected by climate change. More frequent longer duration heatwaves are expected in the future. As heatwaves can increase the urban heat island magnitude under some conditions, heat stress risks the wellbeing of urban occupants. Current understanding of the population heat exposure patterns in Sri Lankan...

Urban heat risk is increasing across the world, as a consequence of global climate change, and the urban heat island (UHI) effect. ‘Heat risk’ is a function of high/extreme temperatures (hazard), intermediary effects of built infrastructure(exposure) and population age, health and socio economic conditions(vulnerability). Heat risk in developing ci...

Air quality in dense urban environments is a growing concern, especially in rapidly developing cities. In the face of growing traffic associated with urbanisation, there is evidence for high levels of pollutant concentration at street level which is influenced by building forms. In this paper, we examine the potential effects of high-rise, cluster...

A rapid increase in high-rise building clusters within developing cities has led to mounting environmental and climatic issues. This is especially highlighted in Asian cities where extreme tropical climates are accentuated by ad-hoc developments, that in turn create unfavourable urban environments. Traffic emissions and air pollution, directly and...

streets (the ‘Avenues Programme’) to make the city centre more people-friendly, attractive, greener, sustainable and economically competitive. While it is well-known that urban green infrastructure (UGI) is a promising strategy to address overheating in urban areas, evidence for the surface temperature, air temperature and thermal comfort effects o...

Global and urban-induced local warming lead to increasing heat risk in cities. The rapid increase in urban population, weak infrastructure, poverty, as well as an ageing population, make the risk more acute in developing cities. However, heat risk is not uniformly distributed and a detailed exploration of the link between urban characteristics and...

Nature-based solutions (NbS) can be beneficial to help human communities build resilience to climate change by managing and mitigating related hydro-meteorological hazards (HMHs). Substantial research has been carried out in the past on the detection and assessment of HMHs and their derived risks. Yet, knowledge on the performance and functioning o...

Air quality in dense urban environments is a growing concern, especially in rapidly developing cities. In the face of growing traffic associated with urbanization, there is evidence for high levels of pollutant concentration at street level which is influenced by building forms. In this paper, we examine the potential effects of high-rise, cluster...

Outdoor thermal conditions influence the quality of life in the urban commons. Urban vegetation is an effective way to improve pedestrian thermal comfort in the tropics as it provides shade, reduces urban surface heating, improves air quality, and human health. The primary objective of this study is to understand the correlation between the Sky Vie...

Although the thermal comfort benefits of shade in warm areas are well known, empirical work on the link between public space use and shade pattern from hot, arid cities remain poorly investigated. The aim of the present study is to investigate the correlation between shadow pattern, outdoor thermal comfort and human behaviour, according to the inte...

Land surface temperature (LST) is one of the key parameters in the physics of land surface processes from local through global scales. Although many definitions and classifications have been proposed to better understand the causes and evolution of LST, not enough attention has been paid to their relationship to factors such as socioeconomic charac...

Biodiversity and crop productivity are compromised by the ongoing worldwide decline of pollinator insects primarily driven by the narrow specialization of modern agricultural industry, dominated by monocultures and characterized by intensive herbicide and pesticide inputs. This approach has the double drawback of indiscriminately killing both invas...

Urban dwellers experience overheating due to both global and urban warming. The rapid urbanisation, especially in hot, humid cities, lead to greater exposure to heat risk, both due to increasing urban populations as well as overheating due to global/urban warming. However, a nation-wide exploration of thermal comfort trends, especially in the hot,...

Heatwaves pose a protracted health risk depending on its intensity and exposure time. Not only cities but countryside areas are also exposed to risk of summertime heat which has not been recently updated at the bucolic scale. This study aims to associate temperature and mortality and explore its temporal variation. A Poisson regression model combin...

Green infrastructure is well recognized as a key urban climate mitigation strategy. In line with this, and following a central government decree, Jakarta Municipal Government has created a green infrastructure target of 30% underpinned by a green space weighting factor. This study questions the efficacy of such a “universal” target setting from the...

Heat stress in Sri Lanka has reached the threshold of extreme heat danger in the hottest months. Although it is not possible to entirely eliminate this increasing heat stress, there are opportunities to reduce and manage its adverse effects and urban planning and building design options could help. Where such possibilities exist, what the barriers...

GLASGOW CITY is vulnerable to extreme heat now and under climate change. The city needs to be prepared. In this document we explore the scale of the problem and HOW the planning profession should respond to the overheating issue

This study investigates the effect of urban vegetation on thermal comfort in a neighbourhood of Lahti (Finland) by means of modeling simulations performed with the Computational Fluid Dynamics-based and microclimate model ENVI-met. A scenario without vegetation and the current one (with vegetation) are considered to assess the effects of vegetation...

The idea of nature providing solutions to societal challenges is relatively easy to understand by the layperson. Nature-based solutions (NBS) against landslides and erosion mostly comprise plant-based interventions in which the reinforcement of slopes provided by vegetation plays a crucial role in natural hazard prevention and mitigation, and in th...

Agricultural activity replaces natural vegetation with cultivated land and it is a major cause of local and global climate change. Highly specialized agricultural production leads to extensive monoculture farming with a low biodiversity that may cause low landscape resilience. This is the case on the Salento peninsula, in the Apulia Region of Italy...

Although the effects of urban form on local climate have been studied extensively in the last 50 years, deliberate design interventions to harness theoretical knowledge on climate-sensitive design on large (urban and neighbourhood) scales as well as specific policy options for mitigation remain few and far between. This is especially the case in th...

This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, building layout, and meteorological conditions that characterise the urban microclimate and thermal comfort in the urban environment. The focus was on two neighbourhoods of Lecce city (southern Italy) characterised through field campaigns and modelling s...

A summary is presented of current knowledge and key considerations in urban climate mitigation that have a bearing on planning practice in temperate climates. Urban climate is the intended or unintended local climate consequence of planning decisions at the street, neighbourhood and even city scales. Such local climate change adds to the changing g...

Live cribwalls are Nature-based solutions consisting of timber-based structures acting as retention walls at the toe of slopes and embankments subjected to instability and erosion events. The structure of live cribwalls resembles a multi-level crib made of timber logs from different plant species (e.g. pine, spruce, hazelnut, etc.). The crib struct...

Sri Lanka experiences severe overheating risk that affect the health of its population. The risk of overheating is the outcome of inappropriate urban and building design and can be further exacerbated by heatwaves. Some South-Asian countries have implemented national management action plans for heatwaves. However, such resilient warning systems for...

The understanding of the relationship between outdoor activities and outdoor urban spaces is a complex issue, comprising a mutual study between urban space configuration and human behaviors aspect. Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre 1987 confirmed that when the outdoor areas are of high quality, the outdoor activity take place with the same frequency, an...

This paper presents a conceptual framework that looks at photovoltaic systems in synergy with ecosystem services. The focus is to connect business success with social and ecological progress based on the operative concept of multifunctional land use. Such an approach attempts to harmonise the needs of the industrial processes of photovoltaic system...

Streets are the fundamental elements of urban form in terms of microclimate as well as place making in cities. Microclimate itself is influenced by climate critical parameters of the Local Climate Zone Classification (LCZ) system. Therefore, a key design question is the role, if any, of LCZ classification for climate guidelines at street scale. In...

Statistics on energy use and built density portrays Colombo as the largest consumer of energy and most significant producer of waste heat in Sri Lanka, and the city is facing extensive growth permitted by current development plans. However, Colombo Core Area is threatened by Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Anthropogenic heat impact on UHI is crucia...

Contemporary changes to climate pose increasing hydro-meteorological risks to cities. In Glasgow, key hydro-meteorological risks include alluvial and pluvial flooding and overheating. While the need to address these risks are clear, it is equally important to tackle these in a climate just manner. Having understood the benefits Green Infrastructure...

This paper is devoted to the application of the modelling approach, as one of the methods for the evaluation of thermal comfort, to neighborhoods located in two cities characterized by a different climate, i.e., a Mediterranean city in southern Italy (Lecce) and a northern European city in southern Finland (Lahti). The impact of the presence of veg...

This paper is devoted to the application of the modelling approach, as one of the methods for the evaluation of thermal comfort, to neighborhoods located in two cities characterized by a different climate, i.e., a Mediterranean city in southern Italy (Lecce) and a northern European city in southern Finland (Lahti). The impact of the presence of veg...

The Planning and Building Regulations developed by the Urban Development Authority (UDA) of Sri Lanka are deemed to be inadequately equipped to deal with the major urban challenges of a rapidly developing Colombo, Sri Lanka-especially in terms of the climate sensitive aspects, within the overall sustainability of the City. The UDA regulations are a...

An installation of a Water Source Heat Hump (WSHP) at Glasgow’s Underground Station, has been using the subsurface wastewater ingress to heat the office at St. George’s Cross station. The performance of the Glasgow Subway’s new heating system was observed for a few months. The energy output readings are being presented. An average coefficient of pe...

In this short communication, we demonstrate that the performance of a typical air source heat pump (ASHP), exploiting a relatively stable air temperature within a subway environment, is high, even during the peak heating months. After a nine-month operational run, the coefficient of performance is demonstrated to be 3.5. The design and installation...

Statistics on energy use and built density portrays Colombo as the largest consumer of energy and most significant producer of waste heat in Sri Lanka, and the city is facing extensive growth permitted by current development plans. However, Colombo Core Area is threatened by Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Anthropogenic heat impact on UHI is crucia...

Real-time occupancy monitoring information is an important component in building energy management and security. Advances in technology enables us to develop vision-based systems. These systems have gained popularity among different scientific research communities due to their high accuracy. Based on real-time video from a single camera, people occ...

Buildings use approximately 40% of global energy and are responsible for almost a third of the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. They also utilise about 60% of the world's electricity. In the last decade, stringent building regulations have led to significant improvements in the quality of the thermal characteristics of many building envelopes. H...

ersed (as in the case of cool islands, where urban locations display lower temperatures than at a rural site), mostly due to shading effects from buildings, vegetation, and other possible obstructions. The study of the relationship between the sky-view factor, an indicator of urban geometry in terms of sky openness, and urban heat island intensity...

Regulated energy loads of buildings are typically explored at the scale of individual buildings, often in isolated (and idealized) circumstances. By comparison, little research currently exists on the performance of building groups that accounts for the interactions between buildings. Consequently, the energy efficiency (or penalty) of different ur...

The importance of studying tropical urban climate was recognised by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as early as in 1981 but substantial improvements were seen only in the last two decades. However specific knowledge of tropical urban climate still lags behind that of temperate climate. In this paper, authors review the state of the art...

Integrating climate-sensitive design with the local planning process is fundamental to managing the warming trend in the growing high-density tropical cities. However, the current planning regime is yet to address the challenges posed by local, regional and global warming. An in-depth understanding of the interaction between the physical form and t...

Abstract This study investigates the joint effect of atmospheric conditions and urban morphology, expressed as the Sky View Factor (SVF), on intra-urban variability. The study has been carried out in Glasgow, UK, a shrinking city with a maritime temperate climate type, and findings could guide future climate adaptation plans in terms of morphology...

The integration of conservation aspects is rarely considered in energy-related retrofit assessments. Particularly, vulnerable to inappropriate retrofit is the mid-twentieth century heritage, constructed during an era of experimentation with new materials and construction techniques and little regard to energy performance. This paper presents an ass...

Colombo is rapidly expanding both horizontally and vertically. With limited land and infrastructure resources, the adoption of compact forms invariably result in high-rise developments and Colombo is not an exception. Current regulation limits its scope to individual plots rather than an urban area. We map the city and its current developments util...

This study reports on the actual energy and economic performances of a water source heat pump recently installed and operated at a Glasgow Subway station in the UK using subsurface water ingress to provide heating and domestic hot water. This follows from a previous publication that detailed the empirical measurements and design of a heating system...

RANDOM NEURAL NETWORK LEARNING HEURISTICS – CORRIGENDUM - Abbas Javed, Hadi Larijani, Ali Ahmadinia, Rohinton Emmanuel

The new development proposals for Colombo, Sri Lanka, advocate high density developments with high Floor Area Ratios. Literature suggests the relationship between the “In” and “Out” plays an important role in energy efficiency targets in an urban setting. The study attempts to identify the probable impact of shade created by urban canyons towards e...

The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification system encompasses climate-critical urban parameters (such as land cover, land use and urban morphology) in its definition. A sensitivity analysis of geometric and surface cover characteristics, could allow an in-depth understanding of which parameters are critical to climate sensitive urban spaces in the...

Abstract: Achieving indoor thermal comfort via innovative, sustainable, energy efficient approaches is a contemporary research mission world-wide. Colour, being a characteristic property of any indoor environment, has rarely been considered for its thermal impacts in this regard, especially in distinguishing a dichotomy of colour perception in ther...

The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neural networks, and it requires the use of optimization algorithms for training. Commonly used gradient descent learning algorithms may reside in local minima, evolutionary algorithms can be also used to avoid local minima. Other techniques such as artifi...

The Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 had a great impact on the local land formation, vegetation and settlement patterns in Sri Lanka. The re-housing developed to settle the displaced people were carried out in mass scale over a period of two to three years. By and large the criteria for re-settlement had little or no consideration for thermal comfort a...

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high-rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alone...

Climate change will bring more heat extremes to the already warm tropical areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The resulting surge in cooling demand will only make the thermal discomfort in tropical cities even worse. This paper presents evidence to the approaching air conditioned cooling load deluge and shows why the air conditioned management...

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high- rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alon...

Glasgow’s local warming continues to rise despite slower urban growth, and overheating is expected to be as problematic in 2050 as it currently is in London. In light of the slow rate of urban transformation, strategies to mitigate the heat island phenomenon are needed to be in place now to tackle this emerging problem. Green infrastructure and the...

This paper investigates the feasibility of utilizing the subsurface water ingress inside the Glasgow Subway (Metro) system. A study has been carried out in order to calculate the existing heat of the underground water. Water flow and water temperature were recorded for fifteen months within fifteen different places around the network of underground...

Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) monitor and control the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) of buildings in addition to many other building systems and utilities. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have become the integral part of BEMS at the initial implementation phase or latter when retro fitting is required to upgrade older bu...

Minimising the maintenance costs of water ingress in transportation tunnels is a significant challenge. Decreasing the overall cost of a ground source heat pump system is equally challenging. An effort to address both issues at once has been made in relation to groundwater ingress in the Glasgow Subway system. Inflowing water is a valuable resource...

This paper investigates the feasibility of utilizing the waste subsurface water ingress inside the Glasgow Subway system. At present this unused excess water is being discharged into the city's drainage system as waste. This valuable resource could be channelled through a water source heat pump to produce heat energy for domestic or public use. A s...

In this paper, we analyze the recently introduced "Energy Efficient Building Code (EEBC) for Commercial Buildings in Sri Lanka" for its applicability to Sri Lankan office buildings. The focus is on the building envelope and air conditioning requirements of the EEBC and their effect on energy saving. In order to this, we develop a "typical" multi-st...

We showed in the previous chapter that growing urbanization and increasing prosperity in the tropical region appears to lead to greater thermal comfort expectation. The question remains as to how to provide thermal comfort at the 'right' level of energy expenditure. Could the active provision of thermal comfort be combined with the adaptive approac...

Rapid global urbanization means that most people will experience the effects of climate change in cities. These effects are augmented by local warming. Much of theis current urban growth is in the warm, humid tropics of Asia and Latin America. This three-part book explores the unique local climate consequences of urban growth trajectories of tropi...

Weathering of materials leads to degradation of the fabric of buildings which if left unchecked will lead to an increase in the rate, and possibly severity, of degradation. Adjustments to maintenance regimes could accommodate marginal changes to degradation rate. However, for significant increases in degradation rate, adaptations may be required. G...

Glasgow is one of many locations within the United Kingdom once dotted with a number of thriving coal mines. Before the suitability of the water stored in mines can be determined for use in ground source heat pump (GSHP) heating applications, it is essential to rule out any risk of contamination caused by exposure to this water. This study examines...

Unusual (>3 standard deviations [SD] above the base climate of 1951-1980) and unprecedented (>5 SD) heat extremes are expected to be the norm in much of Asia and Africa in the near term even as these regions undergo transformational social and economic change (IPCC, 2013). The most populous parts of these continents are within the Tropical belt. Co...

Monitoring and analysis of energy use and indoor environmental conditions is an urgent need in large buildings to respond to changing conditions in an efficient manner. Correct estimation of occupancy will further improve energy performance. In this work, a smart controller for maintaining a comfortable environment using multiple random neural netw...

Manipulating the urban fabric is fundamental to managing the warming trend in the growing high-density tropical settings to both mitigate the negative consequences as well as adapt cities to live with these changes. However, the current planning regime is yet to address the challenges posed by local, regional and global warming. An in-depth underst...

In a warming world, the risk of overheating is significant in temperate climate areas such as Glasgow, UK where adaptation to overheating is low. An easy-to-use thermal comfort evaluation is therefore a necessary first step towards developing effective coping mechanisms. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of Predicted Mean Vote, Predicted...

Although urban growth in the city of Glasgow, UK, has subsided, urban morphology continues to generate local heat islands. We present a relatively less data-intense method to classify local climate zones (LCZ) and evaluate the effectiveness of green infrastructure options in tackling the likely overheating problem in cold climate urban agglomeratio...

Although proper urban planning options could help minimize the effects of UHI, studies to adapt the built environment to climate changes in urban areas are rare, particularly in the context of cool climate cities where urban warming is typically not seen as a current problem. This will change as the background climate continues to warm. While the e...

In this paper, a novel random neural network (RNN) model based optimization process for radiator-based heating system is proposed to maintain a comfortable indoor environment in a living room of a single storey residential building. The predictive model of the living room is developed by training a feed forward RNN and then optimisation algorithms...

In this paper, a novel random neural network (RNN) controller is proposed to maintain a comfortable indoor environment in a single storey residential building having four rooms fitted with radiators for heating. This controller considers the effect of outside temperature and solar radiations on the building and is capable of maintaining a comfortab...