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Introduction
Artificially induced climate change and global warming arising from anthropogenic-driven emissions of greenhouse gases and land-use and land-cover change have emerged as one of the most important environmental issues among researchers in the last two decades (Kadioğlu, 1997; Arora et al., 2005; Singh et al., 2008). The emission of greenhouse gases has increased considerably since the industrial revolution (1750 onwards), with an increase of 70% between 1970 and 2004 (Singh et al., 2008; Revadekar et al., 2012). The latest fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) has concluded that the global mean surface temperatures have risen by 0.74 ± 0.18°C when estimated by a linear trend over the last 100 years (1906–2005). The rate of warming over the recent 50 years is almost double of that over the last 100 years (IPCC, 2007), which is largely attributed to anthropogenic influences. Weather records from land stations and ships indicate that the global mean surface temperature has warmed up approximately by 0.6 ± 0.2°C since 1850 and it is expected that, by 2100, the increase in temperature could be 1.4°–5.8°C (Singh et al., 2008). Moreover, the world has witnessed change in climatic condition at an unprecedented rate in past few decades. Available records show that the 1990s have been the warmest decade of the millennium in the Northern Hemisphere and 1998 was the warmest year.
Today, the world population is approximately 7 billion and grows by nearly 80 million people each year (Sajjad et al., 2009). The dramatic acceleration of urban growth is a universal phenomenon in most countries of the world (Xu et al., 2010). Approximately half of the world population currently lives in cities, and this value is expected to increase to 61% by 2030 (UNFPA, 2009). Moreover, about 80% of future economic growth will occur in cities (Gupta, 2004). No doubt, the urbanization (residential, commercial and industrial development) is playing and will continue to play an important role in shaping a country’s economy but, they are also burdened with many problems associated with growth and the physical environment (Roth, 2007; Rana et al., 2012). Urbanization transforms natural landscape to artificial landscape, and therefore alters radiative, thermal, roughness and moisture properties...