Front Burner - How to fix urban heat islands

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Often when we think about lethal heat, we picture things like forest fires. But the fact is, one of the most dangerous places to be during a heat wave is inside a city. And considering that nearly three-quarters of Canadians live in urban areas, that's a big problem — and one that will only get more dangerous with time. Today, CBC Montreal reporter Jaela Bernstien breaks down what "urban heat islands" are, and who is most vulnerable to their deadly impacts. But this story isn't all doom and gloom. There are also lots of ways to fight urban heat — even some that are cheap and quick — and we'll be looking at those too.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So in a lot of places right now, it is really damn hot. Wildfires are blazing across the Mediterranean in Morocco, Portugal, Spain, France, Croatia, and Greece.

As of this recording, well over a thousand people have died. England is baking. Parts of the country hit 40 degrees yesterday, breaking records. Heathrow Airport, 40.2 degrees was recorded. Hotter than the Sahara Desert and Delhi. There were around two dozen fires up and down the UK yesterday. On Monday, flights out of London's Luton Airport were stopped because the runway melted. It melted.

Here in Canada, even though lots of places are pretty sweaty right now, most aren't currently experiencing that kind of blistering heat. But we've obviously seen plenty of deadly heat waves in the last few years. Part of British Columbia reached 46.6 degrees Celsius yesterday and that- We now know the true death toll of last year's heat dome. 619 people lost their lives. The days of scorching weather have contributed

to at least six deaths so far in Montreal. When we talk about lethal heat, images of forest fires might be the first thing that spring to mind. But the fact is one of the most dangerous places to be in a heat wave is inside a city. That's because of something called the urban heat island effect, which causes cities to trap and radiate heat. And considering that almost three quarters of Canadians live in cities, that's a huge problem. There are a lot of ways to combat this, innovations big and small, and advocates say that putting those solutions into practice right now is literally a matter

of life and death. Today, I'm speaking to my colleague, CBC Montreal reporter Jayla Bernstein, about what urban heat islands are, who's most affected by them, and how to fix them. Hey, Jayla, thank you very much for coming on to the show. It is my pleasure to be here. Well, it is our pleasure to have you. So thank you. Let's start here. And I wonder if you could lay this out for me. Within any given city, what kinds of areas tend to be the coolest and then what ones tend to be the hottest? So if we're just thinking kind of in general terms, not zooming into a specific city,

places in a city that are on the cooler side are generally going to have more vegetation, a lot more shade. They also tend to be wealthier neighborhoods. And then spots in a city that tend to be on the hotter side are usually more dense and more built up. So kind of when you think about that, you'd be thinking about places that look like a concrete jungle, right? Like the downtown core of a city, usually places with a lot of pavement and asphalt and a lot of people living in, you know, high rises, that kind of a feel is going to be usually the hotter part of a city. And how much hotter are we talking about? How much hotter can those areas get? So in some cases, a heat island in the hottest part of a city can be as much as 12 degrees Celsius warmer can be as much as 12 degrees Celsius warmer

or feel as much as 12 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside. And that's, of course, why we're talking about this subject, right, is because even as climate change makes extreme heat events worse, if you're in the middle of a city, you're going to feel that even more. The effect is going to be magnified. And 12 degrees, that's like, that's not a little bit. When we're talking about why that is, I know it's because of a term that some people might remember from grade eight science class, infrared radiation. And tell me about what that is. The best way that I've had it explained to me by someone who's an expert on heat islands is if you put your hand over, say, a patch of grass on a hot day, your hand will feel the air temperature. It'll feel, you know, 25 degrees or whatever it is outside.

But if you were to move the palm of your hand over top of like black asphalt, like a road on a hot day, you would feel on top of the air temperature, you would feel like heat radiating up at you from that asphalt because it's essentially like taking in the heat, trapping it, and then beaming it back out at you. And so that's like a micro scale version of what we feel when we're in cities, when we're in heat islands. It's like all of those surfaces, those dark surfaces, the concrete surfaces that are kind of trapping and putting that heat back at us that makes us feel even warmer. Right. And if we picture a neighborhood with a lot of high rise buildings, like how is that making the area hotter too? So high rise buildings can be an issue for a number of reasons.

So high-rise buildings can be an issue for a number of reasons. One is just if they're darker colored, that could make the environment warmer because of the way that that kind of traps and beams out heat through infrared radiation. But also if we think of where high-rise buildings are placed, like when we built North American cities and some European cities, engineers weren't really necessarily thinking about heat or about making sure that there's good airflow to keep our cities cool, right? They're more thinking about extreme cold than extreme heat. So sometimes high rises are, say, right along the waterfront and they block a natural, you know, breeze from coming into the city and cooling people down. So it's about the types of buildings and how they're built, but also where they're placed. Right. And I guess that would explain if I'm downtown in Toronto and I am sort of at the lake and then I walk only just a couple of blocks north, it just gets so much

hotter. And that's probably also because there are lots of high rise buildings right at the water, like they're blocking that cool air from getting up, right? Exactly. That's the difference we're talking about. And we haven't really, in a lot of cases, planned our cities to kind of take advantage of those natural assets that can help cool us down. In fact, we've paved over a lot of those assets. That's what engineers would tell you. And in pretty densely populated areas, I guess also areas where a lot of people live in high rises, how would human activities make the neighborhood even hotter as well? Yeah, so that even magnifies it more. So everything from driving a car to even air conditioning units.

You know, we, of course, are using air AC more and more. And, you know, rightfully so, an air conditioning unit can help save a life during a heat wave. But at the same time, flicking on an AC unit mounted in a window, well, that actually ends up emitting more heat into the environment, especially in like a densely built Okay, so lots of features of hot neighborhoods, high rises, lots of concrete, not so many tree lines, streets, or parks, probably not a water view. And you said before that this disproportionately affects people who are not wealthy, right? Lower income people. And tell me more about that. Yeah.

So my colleagues at Radio-Canada, Nael Shihab and Isabel Bouchard, they did an analysis on who tends to live in hotter neighborhoods. And they found that immigrants and people with low income are already more likely to live in the hottest parts of a city. But then on top of that, if you're thinking about who's most vulnerable or who's most at risk to the heat, there are layers to that, right? So if you're living in a hotter part of a city in a heat island, but you're also elderly, you are maybe lower income and can't afford an air conditioning unit, or you can't

hop in your car and drive to the cottage for the weekend in the woods to cool off. Things like that can make you even more at risk to heat or other things like having a chronic illness, like a heart condition or diabetes can make you more at risk to heat. And then also physically where you live, you know, do you live in a really old building that just hasn't been updated that has a hot, you know, flat black roof or, you know, really poor ventilation. You can't open your windows to have a good cross freeze. Some of the statistics on this, they're really, they're really alarming. Like I read in one of your articles that a 2016 research paper found that in Toronto, the number of heat-related ambulance calls was nearly 15 times higher in

neighborhoods with a tree canopy of less than 5% compared to neighborhoods with a tree canopy of more than 70%. 15 times higher. That's a lot. Yeah. It makes a huge difference. It seems so simple to say, oh, we just need to plant more trees. All of the engineers, all of the urban planners and community organizers I've spoken to say like it's a simple solution in one sense of the game, but it can make a huge difference. You're based in Montreal and there's a really stark example of this contrast between a cooler, wealthier area and then a much hotter, lower income one right across the road. And tell me about that. Yes. So in Montreal, there's the Boulevard de la Cadie. And if you stand on that road in one part of the city and you look to your left, there's the town of Mount Royal. And it's

this lovely kind of affluent town within the island of Montreal. There's tree-lined streets, you know, nice homes. And then if you look to the right side of that street, you see Park Extension. And this is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada. And the contrast just visually between the way the two look is really, it's really, it hits you when you're standing there because on the right, there aren't many trees. Maybe there's the odd one, but it's really just kind of exposed to the sun. There are a lot of, you know, multi-unit apartment buildings and people who live there are really, they're exposed to the heat. Yeah. Can you give me some other examples of low income communities in Canada,

which have been really badly impacted during heat waves, especially in recent years? Yeah, so one stark example is New Westminster in British Columbia, because I think when we think of kind of people who are maybe vulnerable to the heat or lower income neighborhoods, especially in B.C., we think of the downtown east side. Right. And people in that area were certainly there were mortalities as a result of the heat dome. But another place that really stood out was New Westminster. And it's, especially in the older neighborhood of that part of town, people were really vulnerable and people were dying there inside their homes. And a researcher, an epidemiologist who analyzed the deaths as a result of the heat dome explained to me essentially what was happening there was that people were living in these old buildings that had like single paned windows, glass windows that were

on kind of the southern facing slope of the river. So the afternoon sun was just beaming into these buildings and they were just getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Essentially, they acted like greenhouses and people got so hot that they were dying. Some of them maybe didn't realize that they were overheating. And unfortunately, it had one of the highest mortality rates in that area during the heat dome. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So I wonder if we can spend some time then talking about some potential solutions here, you know, something to try and try and fix some of these issues or mitigate them. And I know there's this really interesting project in the Montreal North neighborhood called La Voisonnerie. And can you tell me, can you tell me more about that? Yes, this is such an interesting example and

i spent a lot of time there because i really i do find it inspiring what they're doing and you know other other community organizations are doing this across canada but this is such a great example of how you know we're we're talking about the problem here but there are solutions and it's not hopeless um and actually the solutions are kind of simple and this community organization called elo that their whole kind of simple. And this community organization called ELO, that their whole kind of raison d'etre is to tackle heat islands in Montreal and help cool down the city. They found this parking lot that's near some affordable social housing. And this parking lot used to just be this hotspot for kind of criminal activity and drug trafficking.

And no one who lived nearby would hang out there. It was just this kind of open parking lot that got really hot in the summer. And what this community organization did was they came in and they literally removed the asphalt. They ripped up the asphalt of the parking lot and turned it into a park. And it's amazing. I went and visited it. Next door is a parking lot that hasn't been touched at all. That is how this space used to be. And as soon as you step over the line, as you cross the threshold into this updated green space, you feel the difference on your body. You feel cooler. The trees are giving you shade.

You hear birds singing. I swear it felt like there was more of a breeze there, but I don't see how that could be possible. But I spent time talking to residents there, and they said, you know, even on days when it gets hot in our apartments, we can come out here, we can sit in the shade of the trees, we can spend time at a picnic table, we can spend time in this community garden that they've built here and socialize with our neighbors. And this is like a refuge for them. It's almost like being in the country, even though this is in the middle of the city. So it's projects like this that community advocates and urban planners are working on really in cities across Canada to try and make

a difference because vegetation and tree canopy really can help cities cool down. And what about some other solutions, complicated or actually more simple ones? Can you tell me about some of the other fixes out there? Yeah. So there are a few different other ways to tackle heat islands and help cool down our cities. One big one is adapting buildings. So these old aging buildings in Canada, there are a lot of them that tend to overheat because they just weren't built for heat at all. They weren't built for climate change. And so there are some who are pushing to adapt these buildings and retrofit them. And I spoke with an architect actually in Toronto who's been leading pilot projects to help update these buildings, to add better ventilation,

to create cool roofs, to actually just like simply paint roofs white. This is a temperature reader. We usually use it to prove how much we're cooling the rooftop. And if you look at the reading, it's 118 degrees right now on the regular rooftop. And when I move it to our coating, it goes down to 72 degrees. To change the type of windows these buildings have to make residents feel more comfortable inside.

But painting roofs white, I've heard of this one, and even painting roads light colors, right? That seems really easy. Are we doing that at any kind of decent rate? Yeah, there's definitely pushes to change, especially roofs, to have green roofs, so roofs with vegetation, or cool roofs, like to just simply paint them white or replace the roof with something else that's a cool color. Places like Phoenix that have experienced heat, you know, more than we have here in Canada are a bit ahead of the game. But in terms of cool pavement or cool streets, the complicating factor somewhere like Canada is that anything we do to adapt to extreme heat has to also function in extreme cold. So it's

kind of this double-edged sword that engineers are trying to figure out as our climate changes. I just want to try and get a sense of where Canada is here when it comes to progress on this, right? Like, I read that New York City's painted millions of square feet of rooftops white. And, and I take your point that, you know, it's a bit more complicated here because of the four seasons, but, but how, how, how are we doing? Are there, are there other places that are way ahead of us when it comes to taking action on this stuff? Yeah, I would say Canada certainly is behind parts of the world, especially parts of the world that are more just traditionally accustomed to heat. Also cities in Europe, when we talk about retrofitting old buildings, I mean, Amsterdam, Berlin, London,

they're all like easily, you know, 30 years ahead of Canada when it comes to adopting old apartment buildings to make them more resilient to extreme heat and to help make sure that the people who live inside aren't suffering as heat waves become more intense and more frequent. So Canada definitely has some catching up to do. So all the people that you're talking to, all the advocates that you're talking to here, what do they say needs to happen to make sure that we're actually putting this into practice, that we're actually moving here? Yeah, it depends who you ask. Some people are more kind of in favor of the carrot. Some are more in favor of the stick.

in favour of the carrot. Some are more in favour of the stick. Some tenants rights groups in Ontario and BC are actually calling for something like a limit on how hot apartment units are allowed to get to essentially force landlords to make sure that their apartment units stay cool and the people inside them stay cool. Without legal maximum temperatures, we're left to kind of do all this on our own. As a tenant, you should have the right to a livable unit. And that means not just a heated unit, but a cooled unit in cases of extreme heat. Now, of course, landlords associations in Canada, most of them don't support that idea. But that's one way of coming at things that would essentially force some landlords to make updates to their older buildings.

But then, you know, others like engineers and heat island experts, some of them are saying what we really need in Canada is an update to kind of building codes to essentially create a standard for what a climate friendly, you know, heat resilient building looks like to put a value on how we need to update our buildings to make sure that they don't get so hot that people overheat and die in them. And then there are other more general calls like more financial support from all levels of government to help both with making cities greener and also funding for updating buildings

to make sure that the people inside are safe. But I think really the big thing that a lot of community advocates and climate researchers say needs to happen is just strong leadership. Strong leadership in terms of, you know, helping to convince businesses that it's worthwhile to do something as simple as give up a parking space for trees, but also leadership in terms of just setting this issue as a priority for cities in Canada going forward. Right.

Jayla, thank you so much for this. It was really interesting. And considering what we're watching happen in London and across Europe right now, it feels incredibly, incredibly important. Thank you so much for having me on your show. All right, so Jayla and some of our colleagues have worked on a whole series on urban heat islands, and you can find that on the CBC's website. And they have this really cool feature where you can actually look up how hot your own neighborhood is. You can look that up at cbc.ca slash news. That's all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we will talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.