The Decibel - Why we can’t air condition our way out of extreme heat

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

The past three weeks on Earth have been the hottest since records began, and the effects of global warming are becoming increasingly deadly as temperatures continue to climb.The 2021 heat dome in B.C. led to the deaths of 619 people — it’s the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. Temperatures rose to above 40 degrees and stayed high even at night. In June 2022, the province’s coroner service released a report with recommendations to prevent deaths in the future.Frances Bula is a frequent Globe contributor who reports on urban issues in British Columbia. She’ll explain how the urban landscape contributes to the deaths, what’s being recommended to help cool B.C. buildings and what the rest of Canada can learn from it all.This episode originally aired June 9, 2022.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

2023 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded on Earth. On Thursday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived. As temperatures around the world soar, we're being forced to re-examine how to avoid the worst effects of heat. We spoke to Frances Beulah, a frequent Globe contributor, during last year's heatwave in BC. She talked about recommendations from BC's coroner about how to prevent heat-related deaths. Today, we're re-airing this episode, where Frances tells us what we can do to cool BC's buildings and what the rest of Canada can learn from it. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Frances, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Yeah, no, this is exciting. I think this is the first time I've, well, no, no, other people have interviewed me and done podcasts, but first time kind of like this. First time on the Decibel. Yeah. So, Frances, you live in BC, in Vancouver, and you were there last year during the heat dome. What was it like last summer? You know, in Vancouver, we're just not used to really warm temperatures. And especially in the last week of June, it's very unusual. And it was very odd because, and this is something that people really noticed when this was happening in the first few days, the air absolutely wasn't moving. So it was like you had a big heavy duvet on you, that you couldn't move. And I'll never forget like the fourth or fifth night when I could feel

like the smallest little breeze. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, you know, at last some relief. So yeah, very, very hot. And if you walked in a street with no trees, it was just stifling compared to, say, my street, which was quite shaded. So the BC Coroner Service just released a report now on how to prevent heat-related deaths, because a lot of people actually died during this heat wave. Over 600 people died there. And this report offered a number of recommendations, including advice around improving buildings in particular. Why do buildings play such an important role here? Oh, it's huge. And when I was talking to people yesterday, I was reminded of all the different aspects of buildings that play a role,

including even just the materials or the pavers outside. You know, some people talked about how just the type of pavers they had in their yard was producing like really extreme heat. You know, certain materials absorb heat, and then that heats up the whole building. Concrete is really bad for that. The color, black absorbs heat, white reflects it. And so I've been writing for years about the urban heat island effect. The actual weather over large cities changes because they produce so much heat that they change, in essence, the environment. So Vancouver, for example, has now much more violent thunderstorms and rainstorms than it used to have because it's a heat island.

And part of that that people talk about is, for example, black roofs. If you have the sea of black roofs, again, they're absorbing heat, they're creating this incredible heat island in this urban area. What were the recommendations specifically out of the BC Coroner's Report, specifically around improving buildings? So the specific recommendation was that the BC building code be updated so that by 2024, there's a requirement that every new building have some kind of cooling mechanism. And everyone thinks that means only air conditioning. But actually, there's another technology called heat pumps, that both heat and cool. And heat pumps, what would that be? So it's magic. That's all I have to say. Heat pumps use refrigeration type technology to be able to draw heat in either

from in the ground, like really big buildings, they'll do geothermal and they'll have pipes in the ground that will absorb heat from the ground and bring it into the house. They essentially act as heat exchangers. Another way to cool a building, of course, is air conditioning. What about the cost difference, Frances, like in terms of putting in an air conditioning versus putting in a heat pump? Is there a big difference there? Yeah, there is. Heat pumps are definitely more expensive. And it really depends on the type of system, whether you decide to dig, put pipes into the ground or do something else. But it's definitely more expensive

than a natural gas furnace plus an air conditioning unit. Okay. Some people have talked about the right to AC. So, you know, we can't leave people in homes when it's too cold, when there's no heat. And the argument kind of goes the same way, that if it's too hot, that's not good either. What have experts told you about this? Should people have a right to AC or some form of cooling there? I mean, I've seen some chatter that just as now there's a law that says you can't have the heat below such and such in an apartment building, that there should also be a maximum that a landlord would be penalized if the heat inside a building was too much. I haven't seen a lot of that kind of talk out here in Vancouver. And again, I'd have to say this is very new for Vancouver. Like extreme heat, it's just not something that people typically think about a lot here. So, I mean, there is this report that's recommending changes, something like establishing maximum heat limits, just the beginning of a conversation here, I would say.

Another part of the recommendations were all about not air conditioners and heat pumps, but about land use, trees, green space, urban canopy and things like that. Because as I was saying earlier, cities create heat islands. And you can try cooling down every house within the heat island. But, you know, a more effective, more efficient way is to try to cool your city down by using different building materials, by providing good tree canopy that shades your city. And even thinking about the way you stagger the building heights, like Alex Boston from Renewable Cities at SFU was saying yesterday, like it's been shown that if you have buildings of different heights, you can create micro breezes through them. Does that actually make such a difference then? We're talking about something like

urban canopy or like building heights, like, is this really a tangible enough difference to make an impact in a city? I mean, it's one of the four recommendations in the report, more tree canopy. And what researchers have told me is that having trees on a street can reduce the temperature by 10 to 15 degrees Celsius. That's very dramatic. That's a lot. Yes. Yeah. And I felt it when I was here, I would go over to Broadway, which has no trees and just concrete. And it's a six lane road with, you know, a lot of, you know, a mixed group of commercial buildings, but very concrete. And it was unbearable. And then I'd walk one block over to my street that's completely, you know, has this beautiful, you know, arching chestnut trees that completely cover the street.

And the difference in just a block was incredible. So municipalities kind of issue statistics on their level of tree canopy, you know, every few years. In Vancouver, it's currently 23 percent and they're aiming to get to 30 percent by 2050. So, sorry, that's the percentage of the city then that's covered by tree canopy? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. so what the researchers have told me is that you know you can't really achieve the same effect with bushes or a few things growing on the tops of you know condo buildings people love putting you know small bits of greenery on the top of condo buildings it needs to be a big mature tree that has a huge canopy you know with a diameter of over so many centimeters

before it becomes really effective as this sort of urban air conditioning natural mechanism. We'll be back in a minute. Almost 70% of the deaths from last year's heat dome were actually older people, were people over the age of 70. And most elderly people in Canada live in a house or an apartment as opposed to a senior center or something like that. What's being done about homes that have been built years ago, older homes, and are not equipped to deal with extreme heat. Right. So that is one of the issues. Like in some ways, one of the things I wondered about is why so much effort on, you know, putting in one more upgrade in new buildings where actually, you know, the developers have already been putting in, you know, air cooling things, they've, you know, thought about that.

Why not devote more of the energy to, as you say, older homes like mine, I don't, you know, I don't have air conditioning, but it's only got single pane windows. So it leaks air everywhere. So I guess that's a form of cooling. But there is a program for, you know, helping people out with what they call retrofitting. But one of the realities, and I'm sure you saw this from the report, many of the people who died were probably in older homes that they rent. Or if they own, they don't have the money. You know, they're not going to go hunting around for some government rebate program that still requires them to lay out a lot of money. And if they're renting, they have to leave it up to their landlords who may also be in a similar position of, oh, that's a lot of money to spend and everything seems fine. So I'll just

keep going the way I am. So I really do wonder about the retrofitting of some of those older homes, because there wasn't a huge emphasis, it was really on new building, which is actually pretty good. So I guess when we're talking about all this, we come back often to the issue of space, though, right? Vancouver has a housing crisis. Urban centers, there's always a fight to build more space for people to live, more buildings. How do we kind of reconcile these things? That is a really good question because the Vancouver Park Board people that I talked to for this story, they said, you know, that's their goal is to improve the tree canopy,

but they said it's really hard. We have a city where people are putting in laneways in their backyards. New multifamily that's going in is being built right to the lot line. Every sort of square meter of land in Vancouver, somebody wants for parking, for bike stands, for cars, for pedestrians, for, you know, building homes and businesses so they said it's been difficult for them to figure out how they're going to do this and they're looking at things like expanding parks by taking over roads on either side of them just shutting down the road so they can expand the park. They're looking at ways to get more trees onto the streets where there aren't any. And I have to say Vancouver's been planting for a very long time, you know, trying, especially the east side of the city tended to have not as many trees on the little, you know, sidewalk boulevards. And they've done a lot of planting there. They're looking at different

kinds of trees that they could bring in that they can plant that can survive sort of difficult street conditions because you know the problem with if you want large trees you usually need a lot of soil and good conditions for those trees to be able to get large. So they're looking at species that they could bring in that are maybe going to thrive a bit better when they're surrounded by pavement and so on. Now, we've been focused a lot on urban BC here, but of course it's not the only place where people have died from extreme heat. In France, in 2003, more than 15,000 people died because of heat. Montreal, Quebec, over 60 deaths in 2018 as

well. These tragedies tend to happen in cities. Is this only an urban issue, though? I mean, some of the hottest places in BC were not in Vancouver, they were Lytton and various cities in the Fraser Canyon. And obviously, that produces a whole other set of problems like having the entire town burned down in 20 minutes, which is what happened in Lytton. But also in suburban areas, big subdivisions get built by having someone go in and cut every last thing down, pave half of it, put up some big houses. And those places also, you know, can become very hot because they don't have any mature trees around. But as you're saying, I guess, I mean, the structure of our cities where there's these

big built urban environments, a lot of asphalt, a lot about how social isolation is a factor, because many of the people who died were on their own, they didn't have good social connections. They weren't reading the news, where it was warning them that there was, you know, a major heat wave, and here's how you, you know, should deal with it. They didn't have anyone checking on them to see how they were doing and so that's a factor too and it's a very intangible one I think it's why people are love just gravitating to the air conditioners and the fans as as the solution because that seems easy we'll bring in an air conditioner and the problem is solved. The problem of social isolation is much more amorphous

and hard to figure out. How are we going to fix that? It's not going to be with a metal box that you attach to the house. Frances, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Yeah, oh no, this is an interesting topic I find. Yeah. Yeah, hope you stay cool. Yes. Well, it's very cool here now. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our summer producer is Nagin Nia. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.