Phoenix Regional Heat and Air Quality Knowledge Repository
This repository houses peer-reviewed literature, data sets, reports, and other materials generated by researchers, practitioners, and other regional stakeholders that may be informative for local and regional efforts mitigating the adverse impacts of heat. The collection is intended to serve as a resource for anyone looking for information on top research findings, reports, or initiatives related to heat and air quality. This includes community, local, state, and regional partners and other interested parties contributing to heat and air quality planning, preparedness, and response activities.
More Information: The Phoenix Regional Heat and Air Quality Knowledge Repository is product of the Healthy Urban Environments (HUE) initiative in partnership with the Urban Climate Research Center.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: heat planning
- All Subjects: infrastructure
The forthcoming century will see cities exposed to temperature rises from urbanisation as well as greenhouse gas induced radiative forcing. Increasing levels of urban heat will have a direct impact upon the people living in cities in terms of health, but will also have an indirect effect by impacting upon the critical infrastructure networks of the city itself (e.g., ICT, transport and energy). Some infrastructures are more resistant than others, but there is a growing reliance on the energy network to provide the power for all of our future critical infrastructure networks. Unfortunately, the energy network is far from resilient from the effects of urban heat and is set to face a perfect storm of increasing temperatures and loadings as demand increases for air conditioning, refrigeration, an electrified transport network and a high-speed ICT network. The result is that any failure on the energy network could quickly cascade across much of our critical infrastructure. System vulnerabilities will become increasingly apparent as the impacts of climate change begin to manifest and this paper calls for interdisciplinary action outlining the need for high resolution monitoring and modelling of the impact of urban heat on infrastructure.
As a result of three workshops within each community, the residents brought forth ideas that they want to see implemented to increase their thermal comfort and safety during extreme heat days. As depicted below, residents’ ideas intersected around similar concepts, but specific solutions varied across neighborhoods. For example, all neighborhoods would like to add shade to their pedestrian corridors but preferences for the location of shade improvements differed. Some neighborhoods prioritized routes to public transportation, others prioritized routes used by children on their way to school, and others wanted to see shaded rest stops in key places. Four overarching strategic themes emerged across all three neighborhoods: advocate and educate; improve comfort/ability to cope; improve safety; build capacity. These themes signal that there are serious heat safety challenges in residents’ day-to-day lives and that community, business, and decision-making sectors need to address those challenges.
Heat Action Plan elements are designed to be incorporated into other efforts to alleviate heat, to create climate-resilient cities, and to provide public health and safety. Heat Action Plan implementation partners are identified drawing from the Greater Phoenix region, and recommendations are given for supporting the transformation to a cooler city.
To scale this approach, project team members recommend a) continued engagement with and investments into these neighborhoods to implement change signaled by residents as vital, b) repeating the heat action planning process with community leaders in other neighborhoods, and c) working with cities, urban planners, and other stakeholders to institutionalize this process, supporting policies, and the use of proposed metrics for creating cooler communities.