Protection from extreme heat is not a luxury, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told attendees at the COP29 climate conference last week: it is a necessity and a sound investment. In July, Guterres’s office published a call to action on extreme heat, which stated that “the world’s cities are heating up at twice the global average rate due to rapid urbanization and the urban heat island effect.”

Heeding that call to action means cutting carbon emissions, of course. But solutions also lie elsewhere – notably, in better urban design, architecture and planning that mitigates excess heat that’s already a reality and helps reduce heat-related deaths and other detrimental social and economic consequences.

“Cities are where we live, that’s where the heat challenges are,” said Rasmus Astrup, partner and design principal at the Danish landscape architecture firm SLA, one of four expert panellists in a session at last month’s Human/Nature design conference in Toronto called “Forecast for Hotter Cities.”

Astrup is recognized worldwide for climate-adaptive designs rooted in nature. This includes SLA’s work as part of the team that created the framework plan for Toronto’s 520-acre Downsview airport site, the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America. “When we started working on the Downsview airport, we were told that we have to coordinate the whole design so it is fitting with the fact that [Toronto’s climate] would be like Barcelona when the master plan is fully implemented,” Astrup said. “That’s the reality: climate is changing. It’s happening everywhere.”

Astrup’s message, shared by his fellow panellists: “Don’t give up hope. We can do something.” Keeping with that mantra, the group presented an array of innovative ideas, planning policies and design projects from Canada and around the world that cities are now deploying to beat back the heat. Taken together, five key themes emerged.

1. Bring back nature

Data gathered for many years across hundreds of cities show what most urban dwellers know from experience: locations with ample tree cover and vegetation, particularly parks and ravines, are cooler than areas that are mostly pavement and other impervious materials.

Shade is the biggest factor. But trees also cool the environment by emitting water vapour into the air. Bringing back nature also has the collateral benefit of reducing other urban maladies – flooding, noise, air pollution and stress – while also boosting biodiversity.

Applying a “life-centric approach” to projects is another way to incorporate nature into the city fabric, said panellist Dorsa Jalalian, an associate and senior urban designer at the Canadian firm Dialog. It’s a concept that puts nature front and centre, rooted in Indigenous thinking. “If you just design an ecosystem that’s comfortable for all life to thrive, people are probably comfortable there, too,” Jalalian explained.

2. Focus on public health and equity

There’s a second correlation that goes with most of the data linking levels of tree canopy and urban heat: namely, that poorer, marginalized, minority populations typically live and work in the hottest areas. “We know that climate change impacts don’t affect neighbourhoods equally,” Jalalian said. “If you take a [Toronto] surface temperature map and the distribution of tree canopy and overlay that onto the socioeconomic data, you can see that wealthier neighbourhoods have better access to tree canopies and more vulnerable lower-income neighbourhoods have poor access to canopies and shade.”

In 2021, the White House directed the Council on Environmental Quality to develop a Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. It identifies communities that are overburdened, underserved and disadvantaged on eight metrics, including climate change. The tool is now used by federal agencies to ensure that those areas receive an outsized share of benefits from investments in climate and clean energy.

What’s ultimately needed is a reframing of the problem, explained panel moderator Fadi Masoud, associate professor of landscape architecture and urbanism at the University of Toronto. “Equitable access to shade and comfortable microclimates are often perceived as an amenity but should instead be considered a public health concern,” he said.

3. Appoint urban heat officers

When it comes to obstacles preventing cities from mounting strong, effective actions to address extreme heat, one of the biggest is a lack of accountability or coordination of efforts across various city departments. A potential solution, according to panellist Owen Gow, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center in Washington, D.C., is to appoint a chief heat officer.

The idea is to have someone in place who can tackle the issue of extreme heat across the entire city, Gow explained. “Can there be one person who wakes up every day in a city focused entirely on extreme heat; who can go to the health department, the transportation department and start drawing linkages between them?” As the idea catches on, Gow said, chief heat officers also become the face of a city’s response to extreme heat.

To date, Gow said, nearly a dozen municipalities worldwide have appointed chief heat officers. The Climate Resilience Center runs a support network helping the group develop and implement strategies and share ideas. “What’s applicable in Santiago is not applicable often in Freetown or Bangladesh, but there are a lot of commonalities,” he said. The result is an evolving “global playbook” with a set of solutions starting to be deployed around the world.

4. Rethink city streets

If cities are hottest where there’s pavement, then cooling the biggest paved areas – city streets – is low-hanging fruit in the fight against extreme heat. Technical fixes include using lighter-colour or permeable paving that absorbs less heat. But for larger road networks, “green streets” are a proven solution with the potential to be scaled up exponentially.

“Growing Green Streets” is one of the primary heat-mitigation programs now being rolled out by the City of Toronto’s urban design department. Still in the study phase, the initiative is “really about maximizing opportunities for growing the tree canopy across the city,” said Kristina Reinders, urban design program manager. While green street projects often start by simply adding planters and flower beds with enhanced drainage on sidewalks, more ambitious plans include tree plantings, rain gardens and road narrowing.

Related

Can a wave of chief heat officers help cool a melting planet?

There’s an urban tree revolution underway in North America

Knight Bites: Six ways cities are trying to keep their cool in record-breaking heat waves

A second option, of course, is to get rid of roads and pavement entirely and rethink planning policies to downplay the focus on cars. “What heats up the streets, what heats up the environment we live in? That’s the cars,” Astrup said.

To illustrate, he showed slides of an SLA project in Manchester, England, that’s still in the design phase. It involves removing the road in an inner-city block and restoring a river bed that had been routed into a culvert and paved over. ‘It’s the asphalt,” he said. “Asphalt is ‘ass’ and ‘fault.’ Why does it have to influence 70% of the space where I live? It is super dumb.”

5. Mandate thermal comfort

Along with focusing on city streets and pavement, planners and designers are also embracing a more holistic approach, encompassing site plans and building designs, to improve and set standards for maintaining a certain level of “thermal comfort” in public spaces. It’s a methodology that considers four factors that determine how comfortable people feel in an outdoor setting: air temperature, radiant temperature, wind and humidity. Those variables are then combined to calculate a site’s score on a thermal climate index.

In Toronto, designer Dorsa Jalalian is working with the city on a study that will ultimately establish a Toronto-specific methodology to measure thermal comfort, one that incorporates future climate projections. The final guidelines will be “performance-based and not prescriptive,” Jalalian said. “As long as you achieve the target or you are designing with thermal comfort in mind, you can pick whatever works best for your project.”

Brian Banks is a writer and editor whose work focuses mainly on science and nature, conservation, landscape, climate and sustainability.

The post 2024 will be the hottest on record. Here’s how cities are becoming more climate resilient appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yet, for millennia, civilizations knew how to shelter humans in hot and dry climates.

As an architectural designer and researcher studying urban resilience, I have examined many of the techniques and the lessons these ancient civilizations can offer for living in hotter and drier conditions.

With global temperatures rising, studies show that dangerously hot summers like those in 2023 and 2024 will become increasingly common, and intense storms might result in more power outages. To prepare for an even hotter future, designers today could learn from the past.

Sumerians: Keeping cool together

The Sumerians lived about 6,000 years ago in a hot and dry climate that is now southern Iraq. Even then, they had techniques for managing the heat.

Archaeologists studying remnants of Mesopotamian cities describe how Sumerian buildings used thick walls and small windows that could minimize heat exposure and keep indoor temperatures cool.

The Sumerians built their walls and roofs with materials such as adobe or mud that can absorb heat during the day and release it during the nighttime.

They also constructed buildings right next to each other, which reduced the number of walls exposed to the intense solar radiation. Small courtyards provided lighting and ventilation. Narrow streets ensured shade throughout the day and allowed pedestrians to move comfortably through the city.

Ancient Egyptians: Harnessing the wind

The ancient Egyptians also used materials that could help keep the heat out. Palaces were made of stone and had courtyards. Residential buildings were made of mud brick.

Many people also adopted a nomadic behaviour within their buildings to escape the heat: they used rooftop terraces, which were cooler at night, as sleeping quarters.

To cool buildings, the Egyptians developed a unique technology called the mulqaf, which consists of tall wall openings facing the prevailing winds. These openings act as scoops to capture wind and funnel it downward to help cool the building. The entering wind creates air circulation that helps vent heat out through other openings.

The mulqaf principle could also be scaled up to cool larger spaces. Known as a wind catcher, it is currently used in buildings in the Middle East and Central Asia, making them comfortable without air conditioning, even during very hot periods.

RELATED:

Here’s the secret to cooling India’s buildings

Can we build greener homes with used diapers? These engineers did

When buildings mimic nature

Ancient Puebloans: Working with the sun

Civilizations on other continents and at other times developed similar strategies for living in hot and dry climates, and they developed their own unique solutions, too.

The Puebloans in what today is the U.S. Southwest used small windows, materials such as mud brick and rock, and designed buildings with shared walls to minimize the heat getting in.

They also understood the importance of solar orientation. The ancient Puebloans built entire communities under the overhang of south-facing cliffs. This orientation ensured that their buildings were shaded and stayed cooler during the summertime but received sunlight and radiated heat to stay warmer during the wintertime.

Their descendants adopted similar orientation and other urban-planning strategies, and adobe homes are still common in the U.S. Southwest.

Muslim caliphates: Using every drop of rain where it falls

Modern water management is also rarely designed for dry climates. Stormwater infrastructure is created to funnel runoff from rainstorms away from the city as fast as possible. Yet, the same cities must bring in water for people and gardens, sometimes from faraway sources.

During the eighth century, the Muslim caliphates in arid lands of northern Africa and the south of Spain designed their buildings with rainwater-harvesting techniques to capture water. Runoff from rainfall was collected throughout the roof and directed to cisterns. The slope of the roof and the courtyard floor directed the water so it could be used to irrigate the vegetated landscapes of their courtyards.

Modern-day Mendoza, Argentina, uses this approach to irrigate the plants and trees lining its magnificent city streets.

Mayans and Teotihuacans: Capturing rainwater for later

At the city scale, people also collected and stored stormwater to withstand the dry season.

The ancient Teotihuacan city of Xochicalco and many Mayan cities in what today is Mexico and Central America used their pyramids, plazas and aqueducts to direct stormwater to large cisterns for future use. Plants were often used to help clean the water.

Scientists today are exploring ways to store rainwater with good quality in India and other countries. Rainwater harvesting and green infrastructure are now recognized as effective strategies to increase urban resilience.

Putting these lessons to work

Each of these ancient cultures offers lessons for staying cool in hot, dry climates that modern designers can learn from today.

Some architects are already using them to improve designs. For example, buildings in the northern hemisphere can be oriented to maximize southern exposure. South-facing windows combined with shading devices can help reduce solar radiation in the summer but allow solar heating in winter. Harvesting rainwater and using it to irrigate gardens and landscapes can help reduce water consumption, adapt to drier conditions and increase urban resilience.

Retrofitting modern cities and their glass towers for better heat control isn’t simple, but there are techniques that can be adapted to new designs for living better in hotter and drier climates and for relying less on constant summer air conditioning. These ancient civilizations can teach us how.

Adriana Zuniga-Teran is assistant professor of urban geography at the University of Arizona.

This story first appeared in The Conversation; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

The post Here’s what we can learn from ancient societies about keeping buildings cool in heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Hottest day ever,” headlines screamed, as the planet clocked a daily global average of 17.15°C, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), a European Union climate agency, which is the highest temperature ever recorded.

Monday’s temperature eclipsed a record set just 24 hours earlier, when the daily global average temperature was 17.09°C, a hair above the record of 17.08°C set in July 2023. The pace of change was underscored by the flurry of activity at C3S, which amended its press release to reflect the new data. It has been tracking the daily global mean temperature since 1940.

“We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years,” Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S, said in a statement issued after the Sunday record. A day later he said, “We have a new record,” noting that the climate event “is still ongoing” and the peak may still change, with indicators suggesting the temperature may dip in the next few days.

A report published in June by a group of international researchers highlighted the “unprecedented” rate of human-induced planetary warming that continues to wreak havoc across the globe. Despite increasingly dire warnings, emissions of greenhouse gases remained persistently high in 2023. The researchers found that “unprecedented flows of heat” are sinking into the Earth’s oceans and that global average surface temperatures continue to rise. Record temperatures last year were “dominated by human activity,” but researchers found that natural climate variability, such as El Niño and La Niña, are also playing a part.

“Our analysis suggests that the sudden rise in daily global average temperature is related to much-above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica. Such large anomalies are not unusual during the Antarctic winter months, and also contributed to the record global temperatures in early July 2023,” the European agency said. In addition, Antarctic sea ice is almost as low as it was at this time last year, contributing to higher temperatures over parts of the Southern Ocean.

Heat is a defining calamity of the climate crisis. True to the form of recent years, heat waves have gripped parts of Europe this month, triggering a battery of extreme heat alerts, creating ghost towns out of popular tourist destinations and driving up urgent calls for water bombers to fight forest fires in Italy and Macedonia. Greece temporarily shut down the Acropolis amid scorching temperatures earlier in July, while some municipalities banned outdoor work, and the zoo in Rome drew up plans to give its animals popsicles.

Related:

• Six ways cities are tackling heat waves with cooling solutions
• Buckling under deadly heatwaves, workers are going on strike in protest
• Can a wave of chief heat officers help cool a melting planet?

North America also saw records smashed, with parts of the United States blanketed by a heat dome in June and extreme temperatures stretching into July. In Canada, wildfires in Alberta’s Jasper National Park sent thousands of evacuees over the border into British Columbia this week, seeking refuge. Help centres were set up, and locals opened up their homes, but B.C. government officials warned that the province, which is battling its own blazes, didn’t have the capacity to accommodate the droves of people and was arranging shuttles to take them back this week.

Some 25,000 people were evacuated from Jasper. B.C. Wildfire service said the region had been hit by 58,000 lightning strikes in the last week, sparking blazes under the dry conditions created by a three-week heat wave.

Extreme weather also poses an increasing risk to the industries that are fuelling it, as evidenced by the evacuation of Alberta oil sands workers from plants that were threatened by forest fires. Last year, Suncor Energy noted in company filings that a 10-day shutdown of its Base Plant oil sands mine in Alberta would cost it $56 million a day.

Canada is warming faster than anywhere on Earth – twice as fast as the global average, with its arctic regions warming four times faster. The global toll on health is well documented: a study published in showed that between 1981 and 2018, 37% of heat-related deaths globally could be attributed to climate change. India has endured a brutal summer this year, with temperatures of almost 50°C in May and June which killed more than 70 people. 

Stela Herschmann, a climate-policy specialist at Brazil’s Observatorio do Clima, says the heat records are proof that “the worst predictions of the scientists are becoming true.”

“What this record shows us is how hard the task ahead of us is, and how urgent,” she says. “We spent the last couple of centuries dumping on the atmosphere all these greenhouse gases, and they will not be gone by pushing a button.”

That’s why, she says, it’s important for people to take stock of the changes. “It should give us the sense of urgency to move and decarbonize deeply as fast as we can, so we can try to live in a little bit better conditions.”

The post ‘Truly uncharted territory’ as world breaks heat record one day after setting it appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, released the draft text of a proposed rule on preventing heat injury and illness amongst the U.S. workers. If finalized, the proposed rule would become the nation’s first-ever federal regulation on heat stress in the workplace. The development comes at the start of a summer that’s already seen record-breaking heat, and days after OSHA announced tens of thousands of dollars in proposed penalties for a case involving a 41-year-old farmworker who died of heatstroke while working in Florida last year.

In a press briefing on Monday, a senior Biden administration official described the draft rule’s requirements as “common sense.”

“The purpose of this rule is simple,” said the official, who offered comments on the condition of anonymity. “It is to significantly reduce the number of worker-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses suffered by workers who are exposed to excessive heat and exposed to these risks while simply doing their jobs.”

The draft rule requires employers to implement heat injury and prevention plans that grant workers access to drinking water, shade, rest areas, and breaks once the heat index hits 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Employers would also have to develop an acclimatization plan to help new employees to become accustomed to working in extreme heat, and train supervisors and employees in how to identify heat illness. (Notably, three out of four worker fatalities that stem from heat-related illness happen on the first week of the job.) Once the heat index exceeds 90 degrees F, additional breaks and increased heat-illness symptom monitoring would also be required. The proposed rule includes a requirement that employers evaluate these plans for potential updates at least once a year.

These regulations would apply to all employers overseeing outdoor and indoor work where OSHA has jurisdiction, which includes most private-sector employers and workers in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., but doesn’t cover some workers at state and local government agencies, self-employed workers, or independent contractors. The draft rule also exempts workplaces where there is no reasonable expectation of exposure to the initial heat trigger, and indoor working conditions where temperatures are kept below the 80 degree F threshold. Furthermore, it excludes situations where employees are exposed to temperatures over the standard threshold for short periods of time, among other exceptions.

Advocates who have been fighting for national heat regulation for years are praising the move. Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the nonprofit Worker’s Justice Project, a New York City worker center for low-wage, immigrant workers, said her group “applauds” the proposed rule.

“The Biden administration is moving to protect the lives of workers,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, which aims to reduce health inequities among immigrant communities. “This effort is particularly critical as states such as Texas and Florida are not only failing to protect workers from the heat but pursuing legislation that will cause undue harm to workers.” Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott passed a law that blocked cities from enacting their own heat protections for workers. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a similar law into effect this past spring.

OSHA first announced that the agency would begin developing a federal heat stress rule in 2021, following a summer of record-breaking temperatures. Typically, the federal rulemaking process is fairly lengthy, and experts and organizers who spoke to Grist last month worried that the Biden administration would let the proposed heat regulation linger under review for another year or longer — at which point, depending on the outcome of the presidential election in November, the rule could be nullified by a new administration or a Republican-controlled Congress. But the surprise release of the proposed rule this week appears to signal a readiness from the Biden administration to advance the regulation, potentially with the goal of finalizing it before the end of the year.

Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, said he feels certain, following a visit from a top OSHA official to his home state in June, that finalizing a federal heat standard is the agency’s top regulatory priority. “I think it’s clear that President Biden and his administration are responding to the climate crisis, are responding to what workers are asking for, and they’re expediting this because workers just can’t wait seven or eight years,” Casar said.

Experts expect that the OSHA rule could face legal challenges. “There are always technical quibbles,” said Michael Gerrard, the founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, “and sometimes, some courts will pick up on those quibbles.” Gerrard pointed to the recent Supreme Court decision to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Good Neighbor” rule, which regulated smog by taking aim at smokestack emissions, as an example of a successful legal challenge based on the argument that federal officials neglected to address public comments on the draft plan. Potentially, going forward, “people who want to challenge rules will take a look at the comments on the draft rule and complain if any of the comments wasn’t thoroughly responded to.”

The draft heat rule is now subject to a public comment period and a subsequent final review by the White House. Given the highly politicized nature of heat regulation, it is likely that OSHA will receive a considerable amount of comments on the proposed standard, which could potentially draw out the process of finalizing the regulation. A spokesperson from OSHA said the agency “cannot speculate” as to when the rule may be finalized, but that it was moving “swiftly and responsibly” to ensure workers have necessary protections.

“All workers deserve safety and an advocate for their rights,” said Guallpa. “We are heartened to see the federal government stepping up to require basic protections from extreme weather.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

The post Biden administration proposes first-ever rules to protect workers from heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Paint it white

Dark roads, rooftops and sidewalks absorb the sun’s energy, contributing to a heat-island effect in cities. Los Angeles has painted streets white to reflect the sun, cooling them by 10 to 15°F. New York City has painted millions of square feet of roofs white to do the same, while Phoenix has painted more than 189 kilometres of streets grey. 

Cool islands

Paris, which is set to host this year’s Summer Olympic Games, has created 800 “cool islands,” which are essentially water fountains or public buildings where visitors or residents can get some respite from the heat. 

Warning sign

The Indian city of Ahmedabad has implemented a system that gives residents a seven-day warning when a heat wave is coming and triggers a coordinated emergency heat response by the local government. Heat-related deaths in the city have fallen by 20% to 30% as a result. 

Policy of shade

Seville, Spain, the land of the afternoon siesta where it often hits 40°C during the hottest part of the day in summer, has installed large awnings everywhere in what the city’s mayor calls its “policy of shade.” 

Cool(er) buildings

In Abu Dhabi, some engineers and architects have designed buildings to deflect heat that often reaches above 40°C. The Al Bahar Towers are two 29-storey buildings with a network of automated folding window screens that open and shut depending on where the sun is in the sky, lowering solar gain by more than 50% and reducing the need for air conditioning. 

Plant trees

Increasing tree cover up to 30% could prevent a third of deaths from high temperatures in cities. Sydney, Australia, is planning to plant five million trees in the area by 2030 to offer shade. Montreal wants to plant 500,000 trees by 2030, and Washington, D.C., has an ambitious goal to boost its tree cover to 40% by 2032. 

Illustrations by Alysha Dawn

The post Knight Bites: Six ways cities are trying to keep their cool in record-breaking heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The applicants – KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, average age 73 – claimed that their government “failed to fulfil its positive obligations to protect life effectively” through appropriate legislation and targets to combat climate change. The court agreed, accepting the women’s contention that older women suffer disproportionately from intensifying heat waves.

Heat-related deaths have spiked by roughly 30% in Europe over the last two decades. A 2023 study published in Nature Medicine estimated 56% more heat-related deaths in European women than men. The judging panel declared 16 to 1 that Article 2 of Europe’s human rights convention guarantees citizens “effective protection by state authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life.”

What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.

– Elisabeth Stern, KlimaSeniorinnen member

The Swiss women’s group, formed in 2016 with the support of Greenpeace, faced an uphill battle. After their case was dismissed by the Swiss Supreme Court in 2020, they turned to the European Court of Human Rights. “We know statistically that in 10 years we will be gone,” KlimaSeniorinnen member Elisabeth Stern told BBC. “What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.”

Scientists say Switzerland is heating up at twice the global rate. Heat domes last fall set new temperature records. Of course, it’s not just Switzerland. The 2023 Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change estimated that global heat deaths could quadruple by mid-century if the world warms by 2°C. 

Given the court’s ruling, Switzerland will need to review and upgrade its climate policies. While the decision is not technically binding beyond Switzerland, it sets legal precedent for future climate legislation in all 46 countries that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights.

Andrew Gage, an environmental lawyer with Vancouver-based West Coast Environmental Law, believes the KlimaSeniorinnen decision will influence the outcome of cases beyond Europe – including in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects individuals’ rights to life and security. “While not binding,” he says, the decision sets “a very strong precedent.”

The post How a group of Swiss seniors won a landmark climate case in international court appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The participants included municipal, county, state and federal officials, leaders of local faith groups, meteorologists and even someone from an Arizona tourism promotion department. But the first speaker, a veteran public health epidemiologist named Eugene Livar, bore a novel title that seemed intended to signal a seriousness of purpose in the fight to come. Earlier in the year, Governor Katie Hobbs had appointed Livar to serve as Arizona’s first “chief heat officer.” The move was part of Hobbs’s far-ranging extreme-heat preparedness strategy, which she unveiled in March. It marked the first time that Arizona would be pressing ahead with an emergency response that, as Livar pointed out, “needs buy-in from all levels of communities across our state.”

Livar is a member of a small but growing fraternity of chief heat officers (CHOs) around the globe that have been appointed with much fanfare in the last few years. There are CHOs in municipalities like Miami-Dade County, Phoenix, Athens, Dhaka North in Bangladesh, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Melbourne, Australia.

It’s not difficult to understand why. Every year, thermometers are reaching stifling new heights: 48.8°C in parts of Europe in 2021, Australia cracked 50.7°C in 2022, China breached 52.2°C in 2023, with new records already being set in 2024. Heat has closed tourist attractions in Greece, schools in Bangladesh and has already cost the global economy trillions in human health, productivity, and agricultural output since the 1990s, according to a study from Dartmouth University. Combined with drought conditions, heat domes have helped amplify massive wildfires that tore through California, northern Canada and large swaths of southern Europe. In 2021, the tiny community of Lytton, B.C., went completely up in flames after it became trapped under a heat dome featuring 50°C temperatures.

Thanks to the rising crescendo of emergencies, public health officials have begun to focus more of their efforts on confronting what has become an annual season of “global boiling,” as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres famously said last July. The question is whether the appointment of CHOs will prove to be more, well, resilient and effective in terms of confronting a deeply thorny climate crisis.

The lethal consequences of heat waves and the urban heat-island effect aren’t a new phenomenon. In July 1995, the brutal combination of an extreme heat wave and widespread power outages killed more than 500 people in Chicago, many of them elderly residents of public housing, who died in apartments that had become furnace-like cells from which they were too afraid to venture because of the risk of violence. 

But deadly heat waves are becoming more frequent. Extreme heat is now by far the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States, according to the National Weather Service, giving heat the moniker of being the “silent killer” of climate change. Over the past decade, heat waves in Europe and Asia have claimed tens of thousands of lives. And, of course, the impact of extreme heat is nowhere more ferocious than in the poorest and most exposed regions of the world, where electricity, much less air conditioning, is scarce.

Three years ago, I never envisioned that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.

 

– Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, City of Phoenix

The appointment of heat officers around the globe is largely the result of a project by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and the Atlantic Council, a think tank. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in promoting resilience, a malleable but trendy goal, for some years. In 2013, it endowed a fund to mark its centennial that would enable municipalities around the world to provide funds to hire 100 “chief resilience officers,” or CROs. 

The foundation discontinued its resilient cities program in 2019, pivoting to the more focused concept of installing heat czars. (Many cities that signed on to the earlier initiative subsequently got rid of their CROs.) Some of the new CHOs, however, had served as CROs. UN-Habitat recently hired a resilience official from Greece, Eleni Myrivili, who had previously served as the CRO of Athens. She’s now the UN’s first CHO. 

Unlike resilience, an indistinct concept, extreme heat as a policy challenge has the virtue of being highly specific. There’s a broad consensus on how cities should equitably confront extreme heat, both in the short term and the longer term, and on what not to do, in terms of exacerbating the crisis by failing to act.

Major science and health journals such as Nature and The Lancet regularly publish policy-minded scholarship about the health risks of extreme heat – including cardiovascular, cognitive and kidney failure – and the effectiveness of a wide array of cooling techniques. Public health officials are also paying much more attention: to the plight of people working outdoors, as well as lower-income households and the homeless – all groups that bear the brunt of extreme heat. 

Municipalities have expanded access to respite services such as cooling centres as a short-term measure. Planning and design experts, meanwhile, have laid out a menu of longer-term solutions – everything from extensive tree planting to the deployment of shade structures to the use of materials that deflect heat. Indeed, a World Economic Forum modelling study published last year estimated that if the typical European city enlarged its tree canopy from the average 14% coverage to about 30%, that move alone would reduce heat-related deaths by a third.  

Yet even, or perhaps especially, the hottest cities do all sorts of things that conflict with the goal of mitigating the impact of extreme heat – approving commercial developments with large surface parking lots or building new highways. The consumer market for air conditioners offers a vivid example of the inherent contradictions: AC, from a health perspective, is the most effective way of countering the physiological symptoms of extreme heat. Some jurisdictions, such as Ontario, have been debating whether access to air conditioning is a human right. But surging AC use also places extreme pressures on local electricity grids, triggering brownouts that may inflict the harshest conditions on marginalized communities.

A study published in 2022 by the Journal of the American Planning Association shows there’s still considerable ambiguity about who, exactly, should resolve these conflicts and coordinate the response. “Although more heat governance is needed, it is unclear who bears primary responsibility,” the authors noted. The study surveyed planners in 69 cities and found no consensus about which level of government or which department should steer and coordinate public sector response. “These findings suggest that if heat strategies are not coordinated across the full network of plans, policies are likely to be at cross purposes and lead to undesired or inequitable outcomes.”

Soon after Jane Gilbert was appointed to serve as Miami-Dade County’s chief heat officer in 2021, the first such post to be created in the United States, she embarked on preparing a comprehensive strategy for a sprawling region that experiences increasingly humid conditions in the summer months. “In the 14 years prior to 2023, we had an average of six days out of the year that reached at or above a heat index of 105 degrees,” Gilbert told NBC News earlier this year. “Last summer, we had over 42 days, so it was seven times higher than the average.”

Her plan, underwritten by Arsht-Rockefeller and released in late 2022, incorporates input from every level of government, the National Weather Service, business groups, non-profits and local universities. She also commissioned experts to carry out vulnerability mapping within the region. 

“My role is different than some typical government jobs in that I work across departments and across sectors,” Gilbert, who is part of the county’s 25-person Office of Resilience, explained in a statement, adding that she is laser focused on extreme heat. “On any given day, I might be reviewing a new policy that could impact how we respond to or mitigate extreme heat. It could be updating our emergency management protocols, writing a grant with departments on tree planting, going out and speaking at a community event or conducting a training for some staff or community members.” Yet her resources are modest: she has a staff of two, a US$300,000 budget for heat season, and another $2.5 million for tree planting and other initiatives. (Miami-Dade declined a request for an interview with Gilbert.)

Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation for the City of Phoenix, says his understanding of his role as CHO is to ensure both short-term emergency measures but also longer-term strategies “for cooling the city and making it more comfortable,” as he explained on The New York Times’s Daily podcast last year. He freely acknowledged how quickly the political conditions have changed. “Three years ago, I never envisioned – nobody envisioned – that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.”

What remains to be seen is whether CHOs can deliver the policy goods. UN-Habitat’s Myrivili acknowledged, during a panel discussion at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, that the complexities posed by extreme heat require the attention of multidisciplinary teams. But, she added, “finding new ways of financing [is] crucial.” After all, it’s one thing to add some money to an emergency services budget to set up more cooling centres during the hot months. But retrofitting an urban area with reflective roofs, better transit, much more greenery, purpose-built shade structures and dwellings that don’t function like convection ovens in the summer months is quite another.

I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes to actually change anything.

 

– Zack Taylor, Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance

As Melbourne co-CHO Tiffany Crawford says, “I think that the scale of the transition that’s required around nature-based solutions and adaptation is monumental.”

Can one office, tasked with a daunting mandate, muster the resources and the bureaucratic heft to get all the players to row in the same direction? “From a governance perspective, I wonder about where it will fit into the organization,” says Zack Taylor, founder of Western University’s Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance. “Where would you put it? Planning? Building? Or as a ‘central agency’ function within the CAO/city manager’s office? Ultimately,” he says, “I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes and procedures to actually change anything.”

It’s worth pointing out that a growing number of cities, as well as state governments, around the world have been hustling to put in place a wide range of policies and programs in response to extreme heat, including many that don’t involve chief heat officers. Some are comprehensive – New York State’s detailed action plan is fairly typical for big cities these days – while others leave much to be desired, such as a widely ridiculed effort by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to install tiny shade structures at bus stops.

Yet substantive reforms have surfaced in cities with CHOs: Phoenix city council this past April enacted a regulation requiring airport authorities and construction companies to establish heat-protection plans for their workers, a move that is expected to affect 10,000 people. Miami-Dade, in turn, this year increased budgets within public housing, transportation and community action departments for improved weatherization services, installation of energy-efficient AC systems, and installation of bus shelters in urban heat islands. 

For all that, countless municipalities – in sun belts as well as more temperate climates where communities aren’t prepared for brutal heat – will need to come to grips with the fact that this kind of climate-related threat challenges so many of the business-as-usual approaches to city building and urban design. Half-hearted or for-show greening efforts must be abandoned in favour of truly effective strategies. We’ll have to break our addiction to impermeable asphalt or concrete surfaces. Architects and developers must find alternatives to air conditioning as the default way of cooling buildings, using time-tested techniques such as better cross-ventilation, tactical use of building materials with passive cooling features (e.g., concrete floors) and the deployment of heat pumps as more energy-efficient alternatives to AC.

There’s no doubt CHOs can play a role in this transition, both in terms of ensuring that disparate bureaucracies are not working at cross purposes as well as communicating with the wider public. But cities and regions that truly recognize the value of these positions will move quickly to wean themselves off the philanthropic funding, institutionalize their CHOs, and then give these officials the regulatory and budgetary clout they’ll need to do the job properly.

“Being the chief heat officer in a place like Phoenix means coming up with great ideas and realizing they’re very hard to pull off within the rules and realities of a city government,” Hondula told The Times. “I would argue it means being a little persistent and being willing to try to ruffle some feathers a little bit. But through those experiences, we’ve generated a little saying among our team: ‘The heat office wasn’t created to maintain the status quo.’”Which is certainly encouraging, because the climate emergency demands far more than business-as-usual. 

John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.

Illustration by Ryan Garcia 

The post Can a wave of chief heat officers help cool a melting planet? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Today, India has 461 million people living in urban centres. A proportionately staggering pace and scale of construction is underway, leaving the country vulnerable to major climatic impacts. A ballooning carbon footprint compounds matters, as globally the buildings and construction sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 37% of global emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Applying the ubiquitous “modern international style” to Indian buildings is only making the situation worse.

More than four decades ago, in an influential essay called “Form Follows Climate,” Charles Correa, a renowned Indian architect and advocate of sustainable design, wrote, “To live in the Third World is to respond to climate. We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.”

For the first 40 years of the Indian republic’s existence, its architectural language was noticeably punctuated by “climatic devices” like vertical fins/brise soleil, window overhangs (chajjas) and latticed brickwork (jalis). These broke up the intense sun into shadowed patterns, kept out the rain and ventilated buildings naturally – almost eliminating the need for air conditioning. 

However, this changed with the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s that saw multinational corporations begin to set up shop in the country. A post-colonial social pressure to be “as good as the West,” coupled with the corporate urge to unify brand image across countries, saw many Indian commercial buildings look identical to their U.S. and U.K. counterparts despite a drastically different local climate. The shift created a sense of “urban placelessness” – and made India’s tropical heat worse. 

The southern Indian city of Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore), dubbed the “garden city” and the “Silicon Valley of India,” saw IT parks mushroom, with “international style” buildings erected in heat-trapping concrete, glass and steel. Soon a sea of high-rises with glass curtain walls (and little ventilation) that could have been in New York, London or Vancouver was built, leading to a greater reliance on air conditioning. Although air conditioning cools interiors, it releases hot air and greenhouse gases into the environment, increasing temperatures both short- and long-term. Rising temperatures leads to more air conditioning use in a vicious cycle. 

Today, Bengaluru, which has a population of 14 million, has morphed from a sylvan garden city with mild temperatures into a dystopian concrete jungle, with untameable traffic, toxic foaming lakes, dire shortages of water and record-breaking heat waves. In April, Bengaluru recorded its second-hottest day in 50 years. As an X user observed, “Never in my twenty years in Bangalore, I ever thought we would need an AC.” Some air conditioning dealers reported an alarming 35% uptick in inquiries, when summer had barely begun. 

LEED buildings still heat-trapping

A second, more climate-conscious wave of corporate offices began with India’s first LEED-certified building in 2004, with a green roof, biological water-treatment ponds and solar panels. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is the world’s most widely used rating system for energy-efficient and environmentally safe buildings. In 2023, India ranked third globally for the number of LEED green-certified projects built (with China in first place and Canada coming in a close second). But LEED-certified designs in India mostly use the same Western paradigms of design and heat-trapping materials with large carbon footprints.

A 2023 UNEP study revealed that climate progress in the construction sector has come from reducing operational carbon emissions – those released during the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings – with not enough of a push to address embodied carbon (emissions embedded in the whole life cycle of construction materials such as concrete). While an imminent update to LEED, called v5, promises to address this, so far it has led only to the proliferation of what architect and planner Robert Orr has called “cookie-cutter green projects that can be placed in any climate, instead of creating a green project that reflects the neighbourhood and region in which it is built.”

Local materials, cooler climate

A growing number of Indian architects are reviving indigenous techniques into designs for modern functional comfort. Architectural materials like compressed stabilized earth bricks (CSEB), rammed earth and bamboo are the new alt kids on the block.

Made with the most local of materials – excavated earth – CSEB is a compressed mud brick/adobe with added stabilizer giving it greater strength. Since CSEB is simply sun-dried, its production consumes 3.9 times less energy than kiln-fired brick. Using excavated earth for these alternative bricks is a circular method that can eliminate the production and transport of carbon-intensive fired brick, thereby drastically reducing carbon emissions. 

In Auroville, an experimental town in southern India, it is common to see two-storey load-bearing designs using CSEB with no concrete whatsoever. The use of these stabilized earthen bricks is possible in even taller buildings – such as the six-storey Symbiosis University Hospital in Pune, India – when combined with strategic supports in concrete. The best part about using mud bricks is that their high thermal mass and porosity makes internal building temperatures in the summer daytime vastly cooler. 

We simply cannot afford to squander the kind of energy required to air condition a glass tower under a tropical sun.

 

– Charles Correa, Indian architect

Though building with mud today is commonly limited to arid regions, architects like the award-winning Tallulah D’Silva, who builds rammed-earth houses in rainy Goa, argue that it can withstand tropical rainfall, too. “Goa has a history of mud building over 1,000 years, as seen . . . in the local ‘taipa’ and cob houses,” D’Silva says. Taipa is an indigenous mud technique that uses wet soil with bamboo reinforcement. Building on indigenous oral references, D’Silva experiments with various local soils and an array of unlikely, but traditionally vetted, stabilizers like cow dung, carbon-absorbing lime and slag (a by-product of the industrial production of glass). 

Bamboo has long been used in the creation of flood-resistant traditional dwellings in India’s northeast. Its incredible growth rate, low embodied carbon and high tensile strength sees it being used today across the country to design radical projects. The Bamboo Research and Training Institute in the state of Maharashtra may be the largest office building anywhere that uses bamboo as the main structural element. And like mud bricks, bamboo also has thermal properties that may in fact cool the structures it is used to build. 

The cauldron of complexity and contradiction that is India contains both some of the world’s most dire climate impacts and its most innovative solutions, many of the latter drawing from rich indigenous canons. However, even with robust building codes and technical prowess, corruption leaves India with vast unregulated, carbon-intensive construction. Yet climate optimism springs eternal. 

As D’Silva says, “In the sea of unsustainability, every drop of good practice counts. If we expose young construction professionals to the right climate-positive methods, in time they will no doubt be adopted as the first method of choice for all.”

Richa Narvekar is an independent academic and architectural designer based out of Toronto and Goa, India.

The post Here’s the secret to cooling India’s buildings appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Workers are taking a stand against the brutal conditions, using walkouts, strikes, and protests to call attention to the outsize danger the heat poses to the people who must work outdoors or in conditions where air conditioning isn’t available. The ongoing threat has taken the lives of people, from a construction worker in the Italian city of Lodi to farmworkers in Florida, and letter carriers in Texas.

The organizing efforts started in Greece, where workers in the tourism industry — which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP — are chafing under the strain. Athens’s most famous archaeological site, the Acropolis, closed for a few days earlier this month, but even as the government reopened it, temperatures continued soaring to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. The Acropolis’s staff, which is unionized through the Panhellenic Union for the Guarding of Antiquities voted to strike during the hottest four hours of each day.

Workers are fed up in Italy, too. Bus drivers have threatened to bring Rome and Naples to a halt, citing oven-like heat and the lack of air conditioning in their vehicles.  Even the employees of a McDonald’s staged a walkout, also citing lack of A/C, which most of the country’s restaurant kitchens lack, according to the Italian General Confederation of Labor.

In the U.S., the heat has prompted strikes by Amazon delivery drivers, and Union of Southern Service Workers members in Atlanta rallied for relief after a Burger King refused to fix its broken air conditioning. Currently, the United States relies on employers to enforce heat safety guidelines, and many do not appear interested in doing so — some agricultural and construction companies even going so far as to actively oppose federal heat regulations. Some say it’s counterproductive to do so, as research shows that working under extreme heat yields diminishing returns – after a certain point, workers’ minds and bodies become impaired, and research has shown the cumulative impact of working in extreme heat is costing the U.S. billions in worker productivity.

OSHA started the rulemaking process for a workplace standard on heat exposure in 2021, but there’s still no firm rule in place. Calls for one have ramped up of late, and the Biden administration responded with the nation’s first-ever heat hazard alert and investments in more accurate weather forecasting, among other measures.

Labor organizations, though, are holding firm in their demand for stronger heat protections. Organizers and workers in Texas are particularly concerned that the state has taken a sharp and deadly turn. A new law strips cities of the right to maintain independent worker safety ordinances such as mandating breaks. The bill, which takes effect September 1, will leave many of those decisions to employers, and many workers don’t trust them to operate in good faith.

“As a single mother who depended on construction work for 20 years to run a household alone, I have witnessed how each summer becomes more perilous for my co-workers,” said Marisol Gayosso, a member of Workers Defense Project who lives in Dallas. “Workers are dying in 100-plus degree weather and the brutality of the climate crisis will only exasperate this reality.”

In response to the bill, organized labor and environmental groups, in concert with Texas House Rep. Greg Casar, rallied on July 25 on the front steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. to demand a federal heat standard for U.S. workers.  The coalition included workers, members, and staff from United Farmworkers, the Texas AFL-CIO, the Sunrise Movement, and other organizations.

The event was preceded by a public letter, released on July 24 and signed by Casar and 110 colleagues. In it, House lawmakers called on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a federal safety standard for heat exposure, arguing that it would require employers and states to comply with safety measures like providing regular breaks and ample water and shade.

Casar, who was previously an organizer with the Workers Defense Project, billed the action as a “thirst strike,” refusing to drink water, eat, or take a break for the entire day.

Ana Gonzales, the Texas AFL-CIO’s deputy director of politics, says that union membership is what has enabled workers from continent to continent to stand up and walk out, but she fights for non-unionized workers, too.

“If you are part of a union,” she said, “you will get those breaks.  Those breaks are in your contract. But for those workers that don’t have unions, we will continue to find ways to protect them.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-heat/as-heat-strikes-so-do-workers/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post Buckling under deadly heatwaves, workers are going on strike in protest appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But the province is just beginning to ask a question that some other places have been considering more carefully: what if the first step to delivering on our most immediate needs – affordable homes, safety in the next storm, cooling to get through the next heat wave, a power supply we can count on – is to tackle them together with a single set of common-sense energy choices? 

Ontario has announced major investments in non-renewable power projects, including a long-term bet on new nuclear plants. But there’s still time to embrace energy efficiency and smaller renewable– energy options (also known as distributed energy resources, or DERs) as cost-effective, quicker-to-deploy approaches to community resilience. These include rooftop solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and battery storage.  

As cities in Canada’s largest province prepare to face more than 50 days with a humidex over 35°C, our vulnerability in summer is alarmingly clear, especially for seniors. Better air sealing and filtration in buildings and shifting away from natural gas can also improve indoor air quality and health, while lowering utility bills.  

 Today’s power grid was never meant to meet challenges like volatile natural gas prices, more frequent severe weather, rapid population growth or the pressing need to decarbonize. Nor was it designed to capitalize upon the massive opportunity to deliver more reliable, cheaper, cleaner electricity by shifting to smaller, renewable energy sources that generate power closer to where it’s needed. 

That’s why it’s time for Ontario decision-makers – public, private, and community – to make the visionary decision to rethink and reinforce our top-down grid from the bottom up.  

1. Make energy efficiency the starting point.

Nobody wants to waste money or see low return on public investments. Whether you’re battling your home heating bill, looking over your company balance sheet or planning the power grid of the future, energy efficiency is the gift that keeps on giving. In fact, the Canadian Climate Institute’s latest analysis shows average household energy savings of 12% through 2050 as the system electrifies. 

And there are big wins for the power grid. The Atmospheric Fund found that Ontario could save $9.5 billion by maximizing energy efficiency instead of relying more heavily on natural gas power plants. And the Royal Bank of Canada Climate Action Institute concluded that timely conservation could save enough electricity to power three million homes by 2045 and save ratepayers $500 million per year.

2. Build new electrical generation closer to demand.

The surest way to decarbonize energy is to shift heating and cooling, transportation and industrial processes from fossil fuels to electricity. But the need for a major increase in generating capacity has produced eye-popping cost figures in the tens of billions of dollars that may mean burning more natural gas and increasing carbon pollution. 

Installing DERs like solar, microgrids, and energy storage closer to where they’re needed can cut losses from power outages 20% while delivering a 5:1 benefit-to-cost ratio on the investment. DERs coupled with deep efficiency help the electricity system control costs, boost reliability, clear grid bottlenecks, ensure business continuity and keep the lights on. 

A recent Independent Electricity System Operator report found that efficiency and DERs could completely clear the province’s projected electricity shortage over the next decade, eliminating the need for new gas-fired power plants. And Ontario wind and solar farms with battery backup are already cheaper to build than new gas plants. If anything, Ontario is likely to run out of demand for gas-fired electricity during the operating life of today’s power plants, and plant owners will find their assets stranded – unless taxpayers pick up the tab.

3. Make grid reliability a priority.

Ontario’s existing electricity system has served us pretty well for more than a century. But it must evolve as we navigate an era of high costs, severe resilience challenges and the opportunity to embrace more affordable, distributed generation options. For businesses, the cost of those outages averages $100,000 per hour – adding up to billions in economy-wide losses. And climate change is a threat multiplier to the key risk factors for power system failures. 

The grid is an aging system in need of refurbishment and reinvestment. But that’s the opportunity of a lifetime: Ontario can direct those dollars to building a modernized grid that emphasizes energy efficiency and distributed generation. The right choices now will deliver returns for generations to come.

4. Integrate and scale the best solutions at the neighbourhood level. 

We can hit our net-zero targets if we apply all the tools and technologies in our carbon– reduction toolbox, pick the ones that deliver the fastest, best results at lowest cost, and scale them up. 

Until now, options like energy retrofits, heat pumps, battery storage and rooftop solar have mostly been directed to individual households. But we’ll see the fastest gains, highest financial returns and greatest contributions to local resilience when we scale those solutions to whole neighbourhoods. 

That’s where options like mass, deep building retrofits, geoexchange, district energy, microgrids, wastewater energy transfer, community solar farms and electric vehicle hubs move from interesting concept to practical reality. We’ll need new approaches to financing and project management, and deep collaboration among communities, governments and businesses.  

And the neighbourhood scale is where we can ramp up efficient travel choices. Sprawling development can double or triple driving, tailpipe emissions and household transportation costs. With many of us working at home, the need for more “complete,” walkable neighbourhoods where we can quickly access most of our daily needs has never been greater. Municipal and provincial policies that bolster infill housing deliver strong economic, climate and community benefits and can increase housing affordability – and business is onboard. 

5. Get prepared and plan ahead.

Anyone who’s lived through the latest storm, flooded basement, heat wave, power outage or wildfire-driven smoke alert will want to be fully prepared for the next one. And we must plan wisely to minimize costs and maximize economic and community benefits: improved energy affordability, local jobs for retrofits and renewables, reduced business interruption, better health and fewer heat-related deaths. 

The evidence is clear. The economic case is compelling. The community benefits are impressive. As we plan our future energy systems, let’s maximize both ROIs: return on investment and resilience of investment. 

Steve Winkelman is executive director of the Ottawa Climate Action Fund and Mitchell Beer is publisher of The Energy Mix.

The post 5 system-changing ways to fight rising energy bills in heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.