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Report: Temperatures within Tirana vary by 6 degrees from neighborhood to neighborhood, from concrete

Politiko 2025-07-03 08:41:10

Report: Temperatures within Tirana vary by 6 degrees from neighborhood to

High temperatures and heat waves that have become longer and more intense can be experienced with marked differences within the same city.

This highlights the importance of urban planning in cities by focusing on elements that create microclimates.

The latest World Bank report, titled "Uninhabitable: How Cities in Europe and Central Asia Can Survive and Thrive in a Hotter Future," brings to attention a campaign undertaken in 2023 by a team of 10 volunteers from New York University in Tirana that yielded interesting data.

“The role of land cover and urban form in determining thermal conditions is highlighted by a measurement campaign conducted in Tirana, Albania, during the summer of 2023. A team of 10 volunteers recruited from New York University Tirana placed temperature sensors on car windows and followed planned routes through the city. Tens of thousands of near-ground temperature measurements were taken during three separate vehicle movements (carried out at 6–7 a.m., 3–4 p.m., and 7–8 p.m.).

By linking heat measurements to land cover characteristics through a machine learning model, a high-resolution temperature map was created for the entire city. It showed strong spatial variations in heat exposure in Tirana during the campaign, with a difference of 6.4°C between the hottest and coolest neighborhoods.

Areas with a higher percentage of solid, impervious surfaces, such as roads, parking lots, and buildings, showed higher temperatures, while areas with more trees and grass were consistently cooler. The hottest areas coincided, at least in part, with lower-income communities: neighborhoods composed of single-story homes were significantly cooler, while areas with average buildings and few trees were hotter,” the WB report says, referring to this study.

The report focuses on the Orbital Forest project, which aimed to plant 2 million trees in a circle around the capital, but the latest data reported in the document is for up to 300 thousand trees planted by 2019.

The report highlights that rising temperatures should be taken seriously as the impacts are becoming increasingly severe across sectors, including energy. Specifically, the report says that countries need to strengthen the resilience of energy systems to extreme heat.

“As summer temperatures rise across Europe and Central Asia, power systems are facing an increasing strain. Heat waves increase the demand for electricity for air conditioning, refrigeration and water pumping while simultaneously reducing the performance of energy infrastructure.

In countries like Turkey and across the Western Balkans, the peak in electricity demand that used to occur in winter is now shifting to summer. This shift was dramatically illustrated in June 2024, when an early heat wave caused widespread power outages in Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Albania, driven by rising demand and declining performance of energy assets.

"Extreme heat damages energy infrastructure in several ways. High air temperatures reduce the efficiency and capacity of transmission lines, which can become dangerously sagged or transport less energy," the document highlights./ Monitor

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