Investigating the attribution of urban thermal environment changes under background climate and anthropogenic exploitation scenarios

Land urbanization is a prominent feature of China's rapid development. The dynamic evolution of land use/land cover (LULC) can be employed to clarify the response mechanisms of urban thermal environment changes to background climate/anthropogenic exploitation. This study emphasized on the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of LULC and land surface temperature (LST) during 1990–2020 in Tongzhou District. Combined with the partial derivative algorithm, the separate contributions of background climate (represented by LULC-LST change) and anthropogenic exploitation (represented by LULC-Area change) to thermal environment change were decomposed. The results showed that the contribution of LULC-Area change was dominated by the negative effect of cropland area change and the positive effect of impervious-area change, whereas, background climate was the main contributor to the total thermal environment change. The unit contribution of anthropogenic exploitation (0.172 K/km2) was higher than that of background climate (0.013 K/km2). Moreover, the eastward expansion of human exploitation led to a gradual increase in the unit contribution of the thermal environment in the eastern townships. This study provides a Chinese case for Climate Action and acts as a theoretical support for adopting nature-based solutions/human forces to improve human settlements and follow a new path to urbanization.