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What the World Studies, Invents and Reports About Urban Heat

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  • Kumar, Narendra

Abstract

We assemble 20,422 scholarly papers on urban heat islands (1990–2025), read the 17,101 that carry an abstract sentence by sentence, and join them to 96,726 news articles (2021–2025), 4,123 patent families, 14,576 recorded heat incidents, registers of companies, funding rounds and government funding events, and the annual accounts of Indian companies. Eight results stand out. (1) The field grew about 9 times faster than the scholarly literature as a whole, and in 2015–2019 titles naming "extreme heat" overtook those naming "heat island". (2) Of 2,409 papers that attribute urban heat to a cause, 48% name urbanisation and land-use change; attribution to anthropogenic heat fell from 18.4% to 7.7%. (3) Research and news describe different problems: at equal text length, 28% of research openings raise mitigation against 1.6% of news leads, while 22% of news leads are forecasts or warnings against 1.4% of research. (4) They also describe different places: China accounts for 31% of the research and 2.3% of English-language coverage, and Delhi receives 7.4 times the coverage its research share would predict. (5) Invention has outrun science: patent families for cool and permeable pavements grew 12-fold in a decade against 2.4-fold for the research on them. (6) Across 194 studies the median reported cooling from urban trees is 2.0 °C (air temperature 2.0 °C, surface temperature 2.9 °C). (7) Between 2021–22 and 2024–25 news coverage moved from the hazard to the people exposed: workers, schools, the elderly and hospital patients each rose 1.4- to 2.4-fold as a share of heat articles while wildfire and drought fell by about half and climate change — raised in about one article in ten — fell by a quarter. (8) The market record is thin: 140 of 5.05 million companies state a heat or cooling purpose, and recorded capital is $2.7 billion of cooling-infrastructure finance against $48 million of venture funding; larger Indian cooling companies grew revenue 25% a year over three years against 16% for Indian companies generally. Every cause category extracted from the research was tested against an independent second reader; three failed, and no result reported here rests on them.

Suggested Citation

  • Kumar, Narendra, 2026. "What the World Studies, Invents and Reports About Urban Heat," SocArXiv r8hcx_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:r8hcx_v1
    DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/r8hcx_v1
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    1. Lei Zhao & Xuhui Lee & Ronald B. Smith & Keith Oleson, 2014. "Strong contributions of local background climate to urban heat islands," Nature, Nature, vol. 511(7508), pages 216-219, July.
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