Phoenix Regional Heat and Air Quality Knowledge Repository

Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice, from local to global scales. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. Such experiments, if carefully designed, provide significant learning opportunities for making progress on transition efforts. Yet, there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture this critical information across a large number of cases, and to guide the design of transition experiments. To address this gap, the article develops such a scheme, in a tentative form, drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases. We critically discuss the scheme's key features of being generic, comprehensive, operational, and formative. Furthermore, we invite scholars and practitioners to apply, reflect and further develop the proposed tentative scheme – making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.

There has been a wide range of low-carbon solutions proposed to mitigate climate change. However, such measures must be compatible with the local environment and living standards of residents to be brought to fruition. Measures that adversely affect residential environments will be difficult to implement, so the impacts of measures on the local environment must be taken into consideration during implementation. This study assessed the effects on urban heat islands of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, as one environmental impact associated with climate change. A simulated assessment was conducted, using an urban canopy model coupled with a building energy model (CM-BEM), to evaluate the effects of five specific measures: solar shading of windows using curtains and blinds, improvement of the thermal insulation of building walls and roof surfaces, implementation of energy-saving measures related to indoor appliances, installation of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, and adjustment of preset cooling temperatures. The study focused on these effects as they occur within typical urban districts of office buildings, fire-resistant housing, and wooden housing. Results indicated that many of the energy-saving measures have slight temperature lowering effects, but solar panel installation and improved heat insulation, both associated with changes in surface heat balances, tend to raise daytime temperatures to some extent. However, effects on daytime temperatures were in the range of 0.1–0.2 °C and, as such, none of the CO2 reduction measures considered was deemed a significant factor in raising urban temperatures.