The influence of afforestation on human comfort in a humid equatorial climate
International Journal of Development Research
The influence of afforestation on human comfort in a humid equatorial climate
Received 14th October, 2021; Received in revised form 20th November, 2021; Accepted 15th December, 2021; Published online 28th January, 2022
Copyright © 2021, Anneli Maricielo Cárdenas Celis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In this article we analyze the influence of afforestation on human comfort for the humid equatorial climate, in which were collected data of air temperature, relative humidity, air speed and sidewalk temperature. The analysis of the observed data, show the importance of afforestation, temperature decrease, increasing the relative humidity and wind speed, and drastically reducing the pavement temperature, which together favor a better thermal comfort. To quantify thermal comfort, scenarios were simulated in Envi-met that reproduce the locations where the data was collected. The results show that Envi-met reproduces well the simulated scenarios for humid equatorial microclimate. The Predicted Mean Vote and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied indices decrease with increasing tree density. Different scenarios can be simulated with Envi-met in this type of climate, with the aim to improve people's thermal comfort.
