Cooling benefits of Urban agriculture to inhabitants—mapping cooling potential of allotments in European functional urban areas

As climate change accelerates and open urban spaces diminish, multifunctional urban planning solutions that enhance multiple ecosystem services (ES) are essential. Urban agriculture, particularly allotment gardens, plays a key role in addressing these challenges. This study assesses the cooling potential of all allotments across European Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) in terms of area cooled, maximum cooling distance and intensity, cooling effectiveness, and the population benefiting from cooling services, using a custom watershed-based tool, OpenStreetMap data, and land surface temperature from Landsat 8/9. Allotments were classified according to their proximity to blue-green infrastructure (BGI) and the types of cooled built-up areas, employing the concept of local climate zones and NDVI statistics. Results show that allotments provide cooling services to 4.1 million people within FUAs, with 1.7 million in Germany.

Each square kilometre of allotments cools an average of 8,221 people, with the cooled area being, on average, 2.8 times larger than the allotment size. The most effective allotments are in Brussels, where each square kilometre cools about 100,000 people. In terms of urban morphology, urban agriculture was 23 % more efficient than peri-urban agriculture, independent allotments demonstrated effectiveness comparable to those located in proximity to larger BGI objects, and only 5 % of allotments cooled areas with the highest heat risk. This is the first large-scale assessment of the cooling ES provided by urban agriculture in Europe, quantitatively indicating that urban planning should prioritize allotment placement near dense urban areas while maintaining their optimal size to maximize urban heat island mitigation.