Urban climate change assessment in case of Aligarh City, North India

Abstract

The present study examines two important and dominant phenomena that influence human life on Earth. The first is increasing urbanization, while the second is climate change. The trends of both of them pose challenges to present and future human generations. The city of Aligarh, which lies in North India’s Gangetic Plain, is the study area. It is immensely affected by urbanization and climate change. The main objective of this study is to highlight demographic transformations, which induce physical, economic, and social change and to examine the impact on micro-climatic elements by analyzing 30 years of data for temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind speed drawn from MERRA-2, NASA’s global atmospheric product. The MK test is used to find trends among selected meteorological parameters and investigate their relationship with land use change. Lastly, the study also assesses the spatial vulnerability among the city population in different city wards. The analysis reveals that the population of Aligarh City has increased along with greater and more intense activities during the study period. This, in some way, has some bearing on meteorological parameters, confirming global climate change at the local level. However, the vulnerability to climate change is not uniform across the entire city. It has great physical, socio-economic, and spatial variations. Thus, the present study suggests that climate change and urbanization are the realities of the modern world, but human response to them would determine the degree of vulnerability.