Geospatial insights into urban heat dynamics from Gurugram’s land use transitions

Abstract

Gurugram, on the southern fringe of the Indian National Capital Region, has changed in two decades from an agrarian periphery into one of the densest concentrations of corporate-led built-up land in northern India. This study discusses how that transition has reshaped the city’s surface thermal field and what it means for sustainable urban planning under Sustainable Development Goal 11. Cloud-free satellite imagery from Landsat 7 ETM + for 2001 and Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS for 2021 was used to retrieve the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) and land surface temperature (LST), sampled at 31 purposively selected points across eight locations within Gurugram district namely the tehsil headquarters of Gurugram, Manesar, Sohna, Pataudi and Farukhnagar, together with Bhaorakalan, Noorgarh and Foundlake. The point-by-point sampling approach captures localised variations both within and across tehsils, which are otherwise masked by district-level averages. Mean NDVI decreased from 0.60 to 0.45, mean NDBI increased from 0.39 to 0.59, and mean LST increased from 28.3 to 33.7 °C, reaching 45 °C in 2021. Over the two decades, the linear regression slope was − 4.48 for NDVI on LST (mean R² = 0.24) and + 7.59 for NDBI on LST (mean R² = 0.34), while the LULC classification achieved Kappa values of 0.950 for 2001 and 0.954 for 2021, with overall accuracies above 95%. Vegetation and surface temperature are more strongly coupled here than in comparable peri-urban Indian cases, so the loss of even small green patches now causes warming that is disproportionate to their area. For Gurugram, this points to protecting the vegetated buffers along the Manesar-Sohna corridor, setting cool-roof and high-albedo standards for new construction, and restoring tree cover along the Najafgarh drainage. Such measures support the sustainable development goals and can also be applied to other peri-urban Indian cities facing similar warming trends.