Science Friday - Degrees Of Change: Urban Heat Islands. June 14, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

We’ve known for more than 200 years that cities are hotter than surrounding rural areas. All that concrete and brick soaks up the sun’s rays, then re-emits them as heat long after night has fallen. On top of that, waste heat from the energy we use to power our buildings, vehicle emissions, and even air conditioning units can cause some cities to be as many as 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than their rural surroundings—creating “urban heat islands.” Between the toll that heat takes on the body and the concurrent air quality problems that heat exacerbates, heat waves kill more Americans per year than any other weather-related event. And if enough city residents are using air conditioning to beat the heat, power outages from overworked grids can add to the risk of mortality. As the globe warms, urban heat islands are projected to become more pronounced, with even hotter temperatures and a more stark urban-rural divide. But scientists and engineers have been working on solutions to reflect the sun before it can raise temperatures, such as cooler roofing materials and heat-reflecting pigments, cool pavements, green roofs, and neighborhood green space. Ronnen Levinson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory joins Ira to describe what we know about cool infrastructure, while Global Cool Cities Alliance executive director Kurt Shickman explains how cities around the world are implementing solutions—and why it may take something as bureaucratic as building codes to see mass adoption of cooling strategies. Los Angeles: Cool Roofs And Fitting The Solution To Landscapes The city of Los Angeles passed the first mandate for residential buildings to have high-reflectivity roofs, a step up from the past requirements, which only applied to flat, commercial roofs. Los Angeles is also pouring cool pavements to test their effectiveness in lowering temperatures. But how do you pick the right intervention for any given neighborhood in a city with as big and varied a landscape as Los Angeles? USC scientist George Ban-Weiss talks about his work tailoring cool solutions to individual neighborhoods. New York City: Green Roofs And Community Activists  While heat waves are projected to kill thousands of New Yorkers per year by 2080, that pain is not likely to be distributed evenly. Research has found hotter urban heat islands are home to higher percentages of poor people and people of color. Meanwhile, while New York City alerts residents of heat events and offers cooling shelters for them to go to, the shelters can be difficult for people to access, or even hear about. Community groups in the Bronx, Harlem, and other parts of the city are working both to cool down their neighborhoods, and connect residents to life-saving cooling. Justine Calma, a reporter for Grist, details the environmental justice problem of the urban heat island, and how New York City is responding. Phoenix: The Hottest City In The U.S. Is Trying Everything Phoenix, Arizona, experiences temperatures over 100 degrees in the summer, and researchers are only expecting summers to get hotter and longer. Hot season durations are projected to increase by several weeks on both ends, while the likelihood of temperatures that exceed 115 degrees is only expected to grow. In 2017, an estimated 155 people died of heat-related causes in the Phoenix area. But the city has been taking the heat seriously. Phoenix has been painting municipal building roofs white since 2006. The city also has ambitious goals to establish shade trees, shelters along public transit routes, and a HeatReady program that would put heat planning on par with disaster preparedness—all with help from scientists like Arizona State University researcher David Hondula. Hondula joins Ira to describe the challenges of getting cities invested in heat preparedness, both short-term and long-term, and what’s next for Phoenix. What Are The Presidential Candidates’ Climate Plans? The first Democratic presidential debate will take place at the end of the month and climate change is becoming a central issue. Former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and other presidential hopefuls have released their versions of a climate plan. The different proposals range from increases in spending to executive action. Climate and environment reporter Rebecca Leber of Mother Jones outlines the major differences between these plans. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, broadcasting today from KUNC in Greeley, Colorado. The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the third chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. The series explores the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a planet and a people are adapting. And this week, we're talking about how the world's cities are grappling with heat, how engineers and community groups are working. to keep residents cool. That's going to be coming up in just a short bit. But first up this week, a check-in on the gatekeepers, the decision-makers, the controllers of the purse strings. The first Democratic presidential primary debate happens at the end of this month in Miami. Climate change hasn't been a big issue in debates, but this year is different.

Senator Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have floated plans along with many other of the candidates. What are the differences between the proposals? My next guest is here to help me navigate that story and other climate policy news. Rebecca Lieber is a climate and environment reporter for Mother Jones based out of Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on. You're welcome. All right.

So the Green New Deal is the big climate proposal that people are talking about, but each candidate has his or her own version. Senators Warren and Biden put out their plans. Take us through what some of the candidates are proposing. I think one of the most important points here is that the candidates even have plans and that we have the front runners coming out with these pretty detailed proposals about what a Green New Deal would mean in their supposed administration. So Biden had a recent plan out this week where he actually took a foreign policy slant to pushing climate change because the U.S. is just a small fraction of global. emissions. Warren, meanwhile, has looked at some interesting facets of carbon emissions, including the military and how to clean up military contractors with what would be in effect a carbon tax.

Inslee, of course, has centered his campaign around climate, so he has had a series of proposals that look probably in the most detail at how to use executive action and Congress to push forward on climate change. But in reality, the Green New Deal is more of an idea than a really discrete plan, is it not? Certainly, I think that's why it's so important to see what candidates are describing what a Green New Deal means for them. There's different timelines that have been proposed. There is different levels of investment. And there's, of course, the toughest question, which is how do we get to net zero emissions?

The candidates have come out with various ideas, including whether it's a carbon tax, whether it's investment and a job transition for a clean energy future. And those are the differences that we can see some nuance when we start to get into debates on how a transition from natural gas would look like, what role nuclear plays in. And there's a lot of nuance between the, bold promise of the Green New Deal. It's interesting also because two years ago it wasn't even on

anybody's radar screen. The debates, the presidential debates, didn't have what, one question perhaps about climate change in it? Right. The last cycle, the general election didn't feature a single question on climate. It only came up because Hillary Clinton brought it

up in the debates and certainly the political climate's changed a lot since then and I think everyone's expecting some questions. But I think the quality of the debate and how much of it we have is what matters. And there has been actually some rumblings within the Democratic National Committee itself and the candidates, because some of the candidates want a dedicated climate debate, but the DNC committee chair opposes that, right? Right. There's been a bit of a back and forth the last few weeks.

And just the, it's a huge sea change just that we are having a debate about having a climate. debate that just shows how how what a major shift we've seen in the politics but Jay Inslee has been calling for a climate debate along with a number of environmental groups and the DNC has come out again and again saying they are not doing any single issue debates and there are dozen debates this cycle and they will have plenty of chances to talk about climate in the debates but you know the argument that Inslee has been making and he has a point is 60 second sound bites will not capture the complexity of this issue. And that's why there's this campaign around getting a debate and shows that this isn't over.

DNC members have been proposing a resolution that they would have to take a vote, potentially forcing the DNC's hand to support a climate debate. So what's to stop some of the candidates? from organizing their own, you know, non-sanction debate? Well, there's a catch that if the candidates participate in a non-sanction debate, then they would be precluded from joining any future DNC debates. So Inslee, so far, is the only candidate to go as far to say that he might do that. Of course, he's polling very lowly, and that is a factor.

But other candidates have also come out saying that they support a climate debate and theory. And I think the question is where this goes from here, I don't think this issue is dead. No, and it must be, I'm sure, as you might agree, it's got to come up in the Miami debate coming up. A large part of it must have a question or two about climate change there. Right. I certainly expect a question about climate change in a city that's being swallowed by sea level rise. But there are so many questions that could be asked. And often in these debates, it gets drilled into a single soundbite. In the past, we've had questions like,

do you think climate change is a problem? And that's an easy answer for candidates. And certainly when we're trying to learn more details about front runners, including Biden, Sanders, and some of the other candidates, we want to hear details. We're well past the point of saying the science is real. Let's move on to another aspect of this.

President Trump has been talking about coal coming back and now just going in the opposite direction. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, has donated half a billion dollars, $500 million to a campaign to stop coal. What are the details of that? What is he investing in? This is the continuation of a campaign that's been going on for years to transition from coal to renewables. And it's been a wild success. If you look at coal has basically been going out of commission at the same rate and even outpacing where the clean power plan would have put us. And just in the last decade, about half of coal plants generating power have closed.

And that trend is just picking up pace. And this Bloomberg investment just shows the power of that strategy and investing in the local fight and arguing on economics, arguing renewables and gas have both come down so far in price that they are cost competitive with coal. And just recently there was this report that showed capacity for renewables has now overtaken coal, which is a huge game changer and that shows coal is not coming back. That's amazing. Yeah, that is an interesting statistic.

Your last story is about big oil companies starting to support a carbon tax. And this was announced at the Vatican. Why did they make this joint statement and at the Vatican? Well, Pope Francis, of course, has been pushing climate advocacy for years now, and he has publicly now endorsed a carbon price. The big oil companies have also endorsed a carbon price, and this is a change in position they have taken just in the last, few years as they face a growing number of lawsuits, especially in the U.S., trying to hold them

accountable for climate change and where they would be on the hook for millions and billions of dollars. So to save public base, oil companies have embraced this campaign of a carbon tax on a federal level and now with Pope Francis' approval on an international level. But when you look at the local initiatives that have actually put forward a carbon price, those are the initiatives that the oil companies still come out against. And we saw that last fall with the Washington State Carbon Initiative. And I think it's important to remember the subtleties to this position that it's easier to embrace a carbon tax that doesn't yet exist on a federal level than for oil companies to improve. embrace what's happening at the local level.

Yeah, because it's harder to fight back on the local level than it would be in a national level. Certainly. Yeah. So this proposal is on the federal level. What's in it for the oil companies? You say it's to protect them against lawsuits, but is it also saving face for them a little bit to recognize the inevitability that, as you just said, green energy is now out of producing coal? I mean, that's the trend. Yeah, a lot of this isn't new for the industry. And Huffton, there are a lot of similarities

between what the oil companies do and what tobacco has done in the past. And a lot of this is a PR campaign. It's not just about what they're embracing, I guess, in terms of the idea of a carbon price, but this is also, it boosts basically the idea that big oil knew about climate for decades without doing anything, that they are doing something, and they're taking some steps. But by embracing a carbon tax, they want a carbon tax on their own terms, and one of those terms is to exempt oil companies from liability. So basically these lawsuits that we're seeing across the nation in various cities, one, stipulation is that they exempt themselves from being responsible in those lawsuits.

Thank you very much. Very interesting stuff. We'll be following along with you. Thank you, Rebecca. Rebecca Lieber is a climate and environment reporter for Mother Jones based out of Washington, D.C. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, tackling the most direct consequences for our cities, and that's heat, while cooling the urban heat island is on so many minds. We'll talk about how cities around the country are tackling that.

Right after the break, stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, broadcasting today from KUNC in Greeley, Colorado. If you live in the western United States, including the San Francisco Bay Area, where temperatures this week surpassed 100 degrees, can you believe that? Breaking 100-year-old records, you can feel there is something different about the climate now. And in big cities, concrete jungles, they only amplify that heat.

Since 1810, we have known that urban centers are warmer than their rural surroundings, our building material. It turns out absorbs more of the sun's heat. They hold it longer closer to the ground than vegetation and soil. And sometimes the difference is as much as 15 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. This urban heat island effect is the poster child for regional climate change, and it's projected to worsen under global climate change. History shows that heat kills, costing more lives per year than any other weather-related disaster we see in the United States.

Heat, as we have seen from numerous heat waves, is deadly. But just as we've known about the heat island for centuries, scientists and engineers have been working on technologies to cool our cities for decades. Remember when the Department of Energy was pushing for white roofs? Yeah. Well, the science of cool roofs, cool pigments, cool pavements, and the use of greenery to cool our streets, well, that science is still evolving and cities are buying in. For example, the state of California requires cool roofs on commercial buildings. Philadelphia has a cool roof mandate for a low-slope commercial roofs. Louisville offers people rebates for installing cool roofs. L.A. took that up a notch a few years ago and required more. They require more residential cool roofs. And we've been looking to you, our listeners, to help direct our coverage. We've asked you to tell us what your community is doing to tackle climate change head on or to adapt, like this project from Jeremy Hoffman in Richmond, Virginia. In the summer of 2017, the Science Museum of Virginia hosted a citizen science campaign to measure our city's temperature during a heat wave.

We sent teams of volunteer scientists all over the city with thermometers and GPS units to measure temperatures across various land use types in the city's metro area. We found a 15-degree Fahrenheit difference between the warmest and coolest place in the same city on the same day at the same time. Now, we're working with the city health department to understand thresholds for issuing heat warnings as we identified higher heat-related illness rates in those warmest zip codes. We're also coordinating with local nonprofits to focus tree plantings and greening projects in the most heat-stricken areas, which also tend to be areas of extreme poverty and health and equity.

We call a team program we developed with a local education nonprofit throwing shade in RVA, which advances health and climate equity education for local teens. We've since also recreated this same type of study in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, with this summer campaigns happening all over the country. Citizen science is the best way for us to empower our communities to understand urban heat and then fight back against it. That was Jeremy Hoppin from Richmond, Virginia, and we would like you, please, to add your voice.

Tell us how you are responding to climate change. In what ways is your community resilient to heat or other aspects of climate change? You need to become part of the story. Please visit us at Science Friday.com. slash degrees of change and let us know. Or give us a call to tell us now how your city is dealing with the heat. That's what we're going to be talking about for the rest of the hour.

844-724-8-8-255-844-Sai Talk, where you can tweet us at SciFri. How are you dealing? How does your city deal with the heat? Let me introduce my guests to talk about that. Kurt Chickman is executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance. He's in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Great to be here.

Nice to have you. George Ben Wise is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Nice to have you. Thanks for being here. You're welcome. And Ronan Levinson, staff scientist and head of the Heat Island Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley. Ronan, thanks for being with us. Nice to have you.

Thanks for having us here. Well, George, let me ask you first. I gave them the colloquial definition of what an urban heat island is. from a scientific point of view, how would you define it? Well, the urban heat island is typically defined as the temperature difference between the urban area and the rural surroundings. And it's a way of thinking about the climate effect that the process of urbanization has had on the region. So basically the process of paving over and putting buildings on natural vegetative cover.

You paved paradise and put up a parking lot, so to speak. Exactly. And it's going to get worse, you're saying, under climate change. Well, temperatures are increasing under climate change. So it's important to understand a distinction between the local impacts of global climate change versus the urban heat island effect. Global climate change is occurring due to increases in greenhouse gases, and those have local impacts on cities.

The urban heat island effect is something that happens. as land cover changes in a city. Now, there's actually interesting research that looks into how those two things interact, and the research suggests that urban heat islands will actually get stronger with global climate change because of the ways that cities warm differently than rural surroundings. I mentioned how hot it's been over 100 degrees in the Bay Area and a heat wave throughout the western U.S. Are these heat waves part of the urban heat island also? Well, the heat waves are caused by large-scale weather systems,

so they're really not caused by the urban heat islands per se, but the urban heat island sort of layers on top of heat waves to make them even stronger. Ronan Levinson, overall, how does a cool roof work? Is it as simple as painting everything white? The technology is a little bit different, but the idea is to reflect as much sunlight as you can away from the building. You don't want to just paint your roof white because a paint that's meant to go on a wall won't adhere very well to a roof. Instead, if you wanted to resurface your roof, your best option is to pick a cool version of a roofing material when it's time to replace your roof. But if you have a roof that still has a lot of service left, you could look at applying a elastomeric roof coat.

which is the analog of a white paint, but is designed to work on a roof. I've seen some roofs now. I was in New York the other day. I was looking at the big Javitt Center, the big center they have down there, and the roof has grass on it. It's green. Is that one of the ways of cooling your roof all? It's a different strategy.

That's a garden roof, also called a green roof sometimes. And a garden roof can be a very pleasant place to be. But if you're going to put a garden on your roof, First, your roof has to be strong enough to hold all of that soil and vegetation, and you have to be able to make sure that the plants stay alive. And if you're in a climate that's very dry much of the year, that means you have to irrigate them. So a garden roof is an excellent way to stabilize the temperature and to keep things cool, but it does require love and care. Yeah, wow. Kurt Chickman, you're executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance.

Why do we need a global alliance for city cooling? Well, it really grew out of the work at the Lawrence Berkney National Lab, and specifically a scientist named Arthur Rosenfeld, who was the grandfather of energy efficiency. And what really drove him and what was an observation that the science for cool roofs and cool walls, for example, and the benefits around them for buildings, for communities, for cities, and even for global cooling was very strong.

and that the products that were available were, have been available in the market for quite a while and were generally comparable in price. And that the weak link was actually taking those two pieces and then looking at the idea that we're not seeing as fast in implementation as those two other factors would imply. So they established our organization, and we've been active for about eight years,

to really work with cities to drive down into what the actual implementation challenges are in implementing urban cooling strategies, both here in the U.S. and globally. And your group just finished taking applications for something called the Million Cool Roofs Challenge. Tell us what that's all about. Sure. So the Million Cool Rooves Challenge is a $2 million initiative to bring cool roofs to scale in places that need them the most.

And what we're doing there is really trying to support with the first million support some boost grants we're calling them to generate the good practices that we've seen work elsewhere in terms of implementation. So things like encouraging broad engagement from government. the public industry, technical experts and academics, like the gentleman that called in from Richmond, Virginia, and also to develop pilots of the technologies in local context so people can see and feel it and also generate local information about the performance that can then drive greater action. And then while the teams there, one will get to scale, which we're defining as applying a million square meters of cool roofs by the end of 2020, and they'll win the second million dollar prize. And this is really driven by the issue of access to cooling.

So it's a little less of an issue in the U.S. but in developing countries, we've got about 1.1 billion people who don't have physical or economic access to what we would consider to be space cooling, so electrical mechanical cooling. And so cool roofs and improving the thermal comfort of buildings and communities is really how they're going to stay cool in a warming world. George Ben Weiss are based in Los Angeles. you know, most people, when they think of heat islands and concrete jungles of cities, they're talking about the pavement getting hot, right? You know, you see during a hot day, people talk about it so hot out. I could fry an egg on the pavement.

We're talking about roofs. Is there anything we can do for the pavement to cool it all? Yeah, so in the same way that you can make a roof reflective, you can also make pavement reflective. And whereas cool roofs have been, There have been requirements for cool roofs for a few years to 10 years, depending on what type of requirement we're discussing. And it's also been researched quite a bit over time looking into the climate impacts and other impacts of cool roofs. Cool pavements are a little bit younger, and they're currently in development by a bunch of companies.

The city of Los Angeles has a sustainability plan. they're calling the Green New Deal, where they're, well, it includes a lot of different things, including 100% renewable energy by mid-century, but it also includes a heat island reduction target where they have the goal of reducing the urban, rural differential by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2025 and 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2035. And so they call out using cool roofs and tree cover, but also cool paper. The cool roof, as you mentioned, policy has been in place for a few years now, and I think the last I heard is there are around 20,000 new residential cool roofs installed. Cool pavements are currently being piloted by the city.

So it started with a pilot project around a year ago, I think, where they converted 14, I think, it was city blocks to cool pavements with new coatings. And they were looking mostly for, you know, pavement engineering types of things. There were some kind of rough temperature measurements done. But now they're going to do a somewhat larger scale pilot program where they're going to pave with cool pavements neighborhoods. And so we're hoping to use that as sort of a living laboratory to be able to measure how, you know, adoption of these cool pavements is affecting surface temperature, air temperature, and other things. Cool. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's go to the phones. Lots of people would like to talk about it. Let's go to Portland, Oregon for Casey. Hi, Casey. Hi there. How's it going? Hey there. Go ahead.

Yeah, so I'm an urban forester for the city of Portland, Oregon, and what we're really focusing on and what we're trying to do with, to manage the urban heat island effect, even in a wet place like Portland, is really focused on increasing the canopy cover of the city, especially in low-income areas where we're trying to do with, um, to manage the urban heat island effect, even in the weather. where historically trees have been removed or not been planted. So by far the most, from the research that I've seen regarding urban canopy cover, that the canopy cover is the biggest thing that affects the urban heat island effect or one of, in two ways, mainly that the trees actually grow over the top of the roads and the buildings and shade them, but also act as an air conditioner in that they pull up water through the stems of the trees and actually through transpiration, or exapo transpiration, put it out into the air, and by that effect, basically air conditioned the city, especially in the urban areas where you have any amount of water in the ground, can get pulled up into the air.

So mainly what I'd like to sort of make more of a comment is, or mainly as a comment, to say that I think cities should really be focusing on making spaces for large canopy trees that can grow over and shade the areas around any impervious or hot surfaces like pavement and buildings. Good point, Ryan and George Kurt, any reaction to that? I think that's a well I can respond I think that that's a really important point you know if you're thinking about not just temperature but actually thermal comfort of pedestrians

having shade is really the most important thing even for the same air temperature so adding tree canopy is a really important way to improve thermal comfort of people the other thing that's interesting too is that even in a place like L.A. you know, you would think that, okay, if we want more trees,

we need to get the water to irrigate those trees from somewhere. And that's, of course, true. But there is actually research that suggests that if you place the tree, you know, in places that makes sense, for example, around lawns, that overall the amount of evapid transpiration, meaning basically water loss from the soil, goes down because of the way that the tree can shade the lawn. And so you actually have, you can actually wash.

your lawn less by adding a tree that shades the lawn. Gentlemen, anybody else? Have a comment. I would just add that. Go ahead, Kurt. I would just add that these are, you know, in every city, it's going to be a basket of solutions that gets to the end goal of urban cooling. And, you know, tree canopy is a critical piece of that. And these are not just mutually non-exclusive,

but they're actually self-reinforcing, as George just pointed out. And there's also some benefits when you are, you know, changing the color of your roof to a lighter color. which is, you know, 20 to 30 percent of a city's area is the roof, which may not always be covered by tree canopy. There can be some benefits when you get to that large-scale air cooling with reduced evaporation that provides some of the same benefits that George was just mentioning in terms of groundwater. Brian, quick jump in? Yeah, I'll just add that if you're going to green your city, you're better off using trees than grass because trees draw much less water. And if you're in a dry climate, that makes a big difference.

That is interesting. And, you know, it's something that I don't think most people think about. They walk through the concrete of the city, and they don't think about, hey, a tree could be here and provide cooling and shade and all kinds of stuff. Kurt, are there gaps between technology and policy, what, you know, cities, urban, federal need to do between we just talk about it and what steps they need to take? Sure. So I would say, yes, there's a pretty big gap because the technology has been around. very long time and we haven't seen the action we want to see. And I think there's a couple reasons for that. I guess the first and easiest one is that heat is a pretty hidden disaster

for us. You mentioned it in the top of the show. It kills more people than any other natural disaster in an average year, but we rarely hear about it unless it's a major, major heat wave. And that actually translates into how it's implemented in cities. You won't find any city or any government anywhere that has a department of heat. And yet if you look at what each individual department within a city's mission is, heat is going to impact it in some major way. And so when we see policies in cities, the ones that are effective are those that gather these different departments together and really start to look at the problem of heat within their own activities, within their own budgets, and so on. And that's great, but that's also

a very challenging thing to do city by city. And so that's why we see, you know, slower than solar implementation than we'd like. I want to thank my guest, George Van Weiss, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USC, and Ronan Levinson, staff scientist, head of the Heat Island Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Ron and George, thank you for taking time to view this today. Thank you so much.

Continuing with our Degrees of Change episode this week, you know, not far from Los Angeles, the city of Phoenix, Arizona, has the distinction of being the hottest in the nation. Starting in May, daily highs surpass 100 degrees and stay there until September. Remember that a heat wave I was mentioning

in the San Francisco Bay Area? Well, the high in Phoenix yesterday was 110 degrees. And when it gets that hot, it's not just uncomfortable. We're talking about health and safety. People without air conditioning, especially the very young and the elderly, they are at the highest risk of health problems or even death.

So how do you help them get through this summer? Well, cities can open cooling centers, but you also have to make sure people go to them, which doesn't always happen for various reasons. We're going to take a look at efforts to understand and safeguard health in the urban heat island. We're still talking to Kurt Schickman, executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance,

but I also want to turn to Dr. David Hudula, an assistant professor, Handula, I'm sorry. Last time you were on, I got it wrong also. Assistant Professor of Geographical Science and Urban Planning in Arizona State University in Phoenix. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Hundula. Good morning, Ira, from Beautiful Phoenix. How hot is it today there? We're only heading into the low 100 degrees today, not as bad as it's been in the past couple of days,

but still warm and still a threat for public health, as you mentioned. And we want to get to that. Let me also bring on Justine Kalma, a staff writer for Grist, who has been reporting on New York City's, disproportionately hotter neighborhoods and the community groups working to both cool down the neighborhood and connect residents to life-saving coolness. Welcome, Justine. Hi, Ira. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to have you. David, I want to zoom in on this idea that the urban heat islands are bad for human health.

And it's not just about being hot and being uncomfortable. People are actually dying there, right? The 600 people have died in the U.S. from heat? Yeah, well, that's a good point you raised, Ira. And in fact, there's quite a bit of discussion amongst researchers and public health officials about exactly what the burden of heat is. There are different accounting systems for measuring how many people get sick from or die from heat. And in Phoenix and in Maricopa County, we're fortunate to have one of the most sophisticated of those systems anywhere in the world. The numbers here locally suggest that in our county alone, more than 150 people have died as a consequence of heat in the past. three years, and that's a significant problem that we're working to address.

And you can't blame that solely on climate change, can you? It's not the sole reason why people are dying from the heat. No, absolutely not. Of course, heat is a major factor in the story for heat-related illness and deaths, and more heat in the future suggests higher risk. But in addition to the strategies we're hearing about from the previous speakers about cooling the cities, as you said yourself, we also want to think about cooling the people, what resources do people have access to to stay cool. And some of our data suggest that some of those social programs and those social factors could be just as or more important of a part of the story

and what future risk will be compared to temperature. So not only do we need to keep an eye on the thermometer, but we also need to keep an eye on the budgets for homeless shelters and other social service programs that are helping to keep people out of harm's way. Kurt Chichmann, I remember that big heat wave in Europe in 2005 where tens of thousands of people died of heat-related causes. How did they respond to that, knowing how terrible that was? Well, Europe has really been an interesting test case for using technology to do a better job of communicating with the public during heat disasters. There's a program called Extrema, which is a satellite program that is now in place in Athens.

and Paris and Barcelona, where the city tracks its temperatures, air temperatures, based on a translation from a surface temperature, every five minutes. And people that have signed up for the program will be alerted when they've entered into a community that's highly heat vulnerable, or when one of their loved ones who signed up for the program has and will prompt them to call them or to check in on them. And that's also tied in with a broader look of inventorying the spaces that cities already have. and guiding folks to those that are cooler, that provide a respite. So, for example, in Paris, they don't talk about heat islands anymore.

They talk about cool islands and creating these spaces. And so the first thing they did was they looked in an inventory of the space they had and found over 800 different locations that could serve as a cool respite for people during heat waves. And they've added signage and road mapping to make people aware of that. And they're looking to add an additional 300 over the next 10 years or so. So this is a really comprehensive look at how we make people safer and more. resilient during the worst heat events. Justine, is it tough to get people to take advantage of whatever facilities, cooling facilities

that a city offers them to just go out there? Well, there has to be cultural competency. And so here in New York City, what the city has been trying to do is making sure that they're partnering with grassroots groups on the ground in the neighborhoods that are the most heat vulnerable. These are, they're generally neighbors that have, higher percentages of residents of color, many immigrant neighborhoods, places where there tends to be less green space, you know, historic disinvestment that's led to neighborhoods with more heat-trapping surfaces and families

that may not have as much access to air conditioning. Now, if the city is relying on making announcements online or tweeting updates, you know, that's not necessarily going to reach our seniors, right, there may be language barriers or, you know, it's really important to just have a beat on how people are actually getting their news. And so that's why you're seeing these partnerships like the Bea Buddy program that was piloted in the neighborhood of Hunt's Point in the Bronx. They're working with the Point CDC, which is a local organization. And they're building this network of volunteers and health professionals at their training to be able to check in

on residents who are the most vulnerable and really build up that social cohesion. Folks can go to their website to sign up to have their, you know, grandmother, grandfather, whoever, make sure that someone is checking in on them in the middle of a heat emergency. And David Hundula, when you have heat

and you have that kind of pressure on people, there's also additional factors that the heat may exacerbate like air quality, right? Absolutely, yeah. The heat can absolutely be a compounding issue, a cascading issue, if you will. One of the possible cascades that we've been talking about ties into this term we've heard Kurt using heat disaster. We know that the heat and the power systems are closely coupled, and we see one of the most significant risks facing health in Phoenix is the possibility of a coupled heat wave and power failure. in the summer months in the future.

And we know that heat can trigger power failures because of the way that the infrastructure interacts with the weather. So we're really trying to think about with our public health partners and city officials, how do we handle these interesting interdependencies that you bring up? And how does Phoenix, as you say, Phoenix 110? How is Phoenix hoping to tackle all of this? Yeah, I love the point that Kurt made earlier when he raised the concept of the Department of Heat.

And that's absolutely been our experience here as well. One of my colleagues says that heat is everyone's concerned, but no one's responsibility. And although that's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek saying it really resonates with our experience working with cities, there is a lot of concern about this topic in the various city halls in this region. But it is not entirely clear who's in charge, whose decision will it be to make a certain investment, to make a certain priority. And the city of Phoenix, as spurred by some funding that it received from the Bloomberg Philanthropies out of New York City last summer, is really trying to think about what the

governance model will be, what the organizational model should be, how do we ensure that heat and thermal comfort and related considerations are part of these decision-making criteria across the organization, which we think is absolutely essential. As we've heard other speakers say, heat can be a part of the story of every action that every department is taking, and the city of Phoenix and others around here are looking to build that glue to ensure that that heat is in the conversation explicitly. Justine, you've been reporting on New York City's work with grassroots organizers to fix some of the flaws you talked about in the system.

How has that been working out? So what I heard from the point CDC, one of the city's first partners, is that it's been successful so far. They're growing their network. They're better able to get folks to cooling centers in the neighborhood, you know, versus relying on posters or signs to get people there. They're actually, you know, bringing people in. But it's really, it's a two-prong approach. On one end, they're trying to improve and overhaul the communications and emergency response system, build up that social cohesion. And then on the other hand, they're also, making sure that they're greening these neighborhoods, so changing the actual physical environment,

like planting green roofs and making sure there are more trees, like one of your callers said, and green space in particularly low-income neighborhoods or places that have more industrial development. So there's a lot of promise and excitement there. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Coming to you from Greeley, Colorado, KUNC, with my guest, Kurt Chickman, Justine Kalma, and David Handula. We're talking about heat islands and what happens. And now we've moved on to talk about how do you rescue, how do you help people who are most vulnerable? You know, we hear about the elderly.

Why are the very young so at risk when it's so hot out? Justine, do you look into that also? Yeah, you know, one of the things that I look into, I also look at air quality and heat vulnerability, you know, particularly in neighborhoods where children have higher rates of asthma, that can be triggered by heat. People with restoratory illnesses are also among the vulnerable. And so you can see that impacting young people as well. And so that's another way that some of these neighborhoods that have more. more industry, pollution, and higher temperatures, you know, kind of get a triple whammy of these effects.

Let me see if I can get a phone call or two in before we have to go. Let's go to Fred in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hi, Fred. Hi, Aaron. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm a big fan. Hi, go ahead. So I'm a grassroots organizer with a local citizen group here, the community for sustainable energy.

And we're working to get our municipal utility to lease parking. lot and rooftop space for utility in solar panels. And I've read that in the natural environment. Solar panels can increase the local temperature. I'm curious if they have the same impact on the built environment. Do they impact the urban heat island effects, especially if they're shading parking lots, does that increase or decreased temperature? Kurt, would you know that?

Yeah, so it's a bit of a mixed bag. So when you've got solar panels on your roof or over a paved space, you're certainly creating a more comfortable space. underneath and reducing the thermal load that's, you know, on the building itself. And in many cases, you can pair solar with some of these other interventions we've been talking about, like vegetation and, you know, more reflective or lighter-colored surfaces and have positive reactions for both. So you have, you're cooling off the panels, for example. So it's not a definitive answer to say it makes things hotter.

I think generally what we say is we want to pair the panels with other interventions, so we're getting the benefits of the multiple different ways you can attack this problem. All right. My last question is, we want to leave our listeners with an action they can take. What can they, what can we do about heat islands? Kurt, first you. Sure. So I guess I would start with on the homeowner's side, you know, we don't like to think about our roofs that much. But when you are replacing your roof or doing any work on your roof, there are, for every type of roof that's out there now, there's a cool option and asking about that and making that decision when that's, when the time comes, would be great. I'd also note that, you know, there's opportunities to be involved in volunteer. organizations that plant trees and maintain trees with the cities. That's a huge benefit. And then finally, just going back to the caller at the beginning, Jeremy Hoffman from Richmond, there are growing movements around citizen science and volunteering to help those is immeasurably valuable for cities as they're trying to understand this problem and tackle it

and target their intervention. So I'd say those are the three that I'd mention. David, give me your best. Yeah, playing off of the theme that Kurt raised there, I'd advocate for joining the public dialogue on this topic. There are zoning meetings, city council meetings, planning commission meetings where decisions are being made that are going to affect heat and quality of life in our cities, and the more participation we can have in those meetings and advocacy for heat, shade, cooling amenities, the better. And if joining those meetings doesn't work for you, doesn't fit into your schedule, ask city representatives and staff to meet with you and your organizations

and your family. I think there's eagerness to hear more perspectives about. how we can cool our cities. I want to thank all of you for joining us today, Dr. David Hondula, assistant to professor of geographical science and urban planning at Arizona State. Justine Kulma, staff writer for Grist in New York, and Kurt Chickman, Executive Director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance. Thank you all for joining us today. And our degrees of change series needs your voice from our listeners. Tell us how you are responding to climate change. In what ways is your community increasing its resilience to climate change? We want you to become part of the story, so visit us at ScienceFriday.com slash degrees of change.

Let us know. ScienceFriday.com slash degrees of change. Charles Berk was as our director, senior producer Christopher and Taliatta. Producers are Alexa Lynn, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather. And we had great technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. Also, thanks to Ryan Thompson, Robert Ligia, Neil Best, and all the great folks here at KUNC in Greeley, Colorado, who welcomed us into their studios today. And as every week we tell you,

we're active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. You can even ask your speaker to play Science Friday. So every day now is Science Friday. In Greatly, Colorado, I'm Ira Flato.