As heat waves become longer, hotter, and more widespread across the planet, human responses to them are becoming increasingly local and specialized
last September, such as opening cooling centers in school buildings, and developing workplace heat standards and oversight. Those efforts serve a worthy purpose to set national standards.But programs to upgrade buildings or plant trees in highly urbanized areas have to be targeted for them to pay off. In the U.S., Miami-Dade county is developing initiatives based on very specific data tied to heat-related hospitalizations and emergency department visits by patients’ zip codes.
Posters to educate the public on ways to beat the heat were placed in bus shelters in Miami-Dade CountyJust this past weekend, the county once again leveraged its data to distribute 2,700 trees to property owners who were alerted to the giveaway via direct mail. About 2,400 of the trees went to 1,200 households. The rest were donated to nonprofits. “We’re trying to get to 30% tree canopy, but really prioritizing those areas with the highest need,” Gilbert says.
In Phoenix, the city’s Heat Response and Mitigation Office has taken a similar approach. For its tree planting efforts, the city is tapping into data about people’s walking habits. Then, it can target specific streets with the most pedestrians who can benefit from the tree canopy shade. But David Hondula, who heads the department, emphasizes that even hyper local data can fall short, missing, for instance, unsheltered populations that are hard to track.
For example, as the city was planning to increase the shaded areas around bus stops, Hondula attended a community meeting where one resident pressed for shade at a stop that Hondula knew was not on any city bus route. “I knew there was no bus stop. I knew it, I was the expert,” he recalls. But as the conversation unfolded, it became apparent that the resident“It was outside of our frame of thinking for shade investments.