OSLO: Heat trapped by dark-coloured roads and buildings will more than double cities’ costs for tackling global warming this century by driving up energy demand to keep citizens cool and by aggravating pollution, scientists said on Monday.

The “urban heat island effect”, under which cities are often several degrees warmer than nearby rural areas, adds to air and water pollution and can make sweltering workers less productive, it said.

“The focus has been so long on global climate change that we forgot about the local effects,” co-author Richard Tol, economics professor at the University of Sussex, England, said.

“Ignoring the urban heat island effect leads to a fairly drastic under-estimate of the total impact of climate change,” he said. About 54 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, which cover just one percent of the Earth’s surface.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2017