Urban Heat Equity

Heat is widely recognized as a major urban planning challenge for cities contending with the impacts of climate change. Rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves can impact urban infrastructure and systems. Increasingly, it is also being recognized as a public health and social equity concern. Heat causes more deaths than any other climate-related disaster. The urban climate literature has shown conclusively that the way we design cities can impact how heat is stored and experienced. Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat due to the urban heat island effect, which causes densely built urban spaces to trap more heat than surrounding areas.  There is a growing body of literature exploring the uneven impacts of climate change broadly, however, it is unclear how much, if any, of this research looks specifically at heat. As cities adopt heat management strategies to address the challenge heat, it is critical that they consider how existing vulnerabilities affect individuals’ and communities’ capacity to survive the heat. 

Questions

Publications

Turner, V. K., French, E. M., Dialesandro, J., Middel, A., Hondula, D., Ban-Weiss, G., & Abdelatti, H. (2022). How are cities planning for heat? Content analysis of United States municipal plans. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac73a9

Turner, V. K., French, E. M., & Hondula, D. (2021). How are U.S. Cities Planning for Heat? [Dataset]. NHERI. https://www.designsafe ci.org/data/browser/public/designsafe.storage.published//PRJ-3180

Turek-Hankins, L. L. et al. (2021). Climate change adaptation to extreme heat: A global systematic review of implemented action. Oxford Open Climate Change, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgab005