Abstract

Urban heat islands were increasingly recognized as socio-ecological phenomena reflecting unequal urban development. The study modeled intra-urban thermal variability in a mega-city using remotely sensed land surface temperature, vegetation indices, impervious surface data, and a composite social vulnerability index. Environmental justice and urban political ecology provided the theoretical framework for interpreting spatial temperature patterns as expressions of environmental inequity. Land surface temperature was derived from Landsat-8 imagery, while spatial regression techniques, including geographically weighted regression, were applied to examine non-stationary relationships between thermal conditions and explanatory variables. The results showed a strong negative relationship between vegetation cover and temperature and a significant positive association between social vulnerability and thermal exposure. The geographically weighted regression model improved explanatory power and revealed localized clusters where high temperatures coincided with disadvantaged neighborhoods. The findings demonstrated that urban heat islands were not only products of land-cover change but also outcomes of political–economic processes that structured access to cooling resources. The study concluded that equitable climate adaptation required the redistribution of green infrastructure and the integration of justice considerations into urban planning.