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.

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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.

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For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have a lot of good plans and a lot of good targets,” he says. But Montreal’s carbon has climbed since the pandemic, and the prospect for hitting the 2030 mark – 55% below 1990 levels – seems poor. “We don’t really know how we can do a reduction of about one-third of emissions within the next five years.”

The City of Toronto also has an expansive net-zero plan, dubbed TransformTO, as well as one of North America’s few municipal policies (the Toronto Green Standard) designed to push builders to drive energy efficiency beyond the low bar in the Ontario Building Code. But it suffers from the same dilemma. TransformTO, says Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, “still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.” Case in point: city council finally approved, but has not yet allocated funding for, a waterfront LRT meant to provide transit access to existing and planned high-density developments on Toronto’s de-industrialized port lands.

A few other cities have fared better when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. Halifax Regional Municipality last year imposed a climate change tax as a pillar of its broader sustainability strategy, dubbed HalifACT. “At the time, it was the only one of its kind across Canada, and that had some really contentious public support,” says Kortney Dunsby, sustainable cities co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. The funding has gone toward investments such as building retrofits.

However, recent population growth and housing price spikes in the Halifax region appear to be driving sprawl as developers snap up cheap land along the region’s edges, with little resistance from the municipality and little in the way of transit investment to service those emerging communities. “Greenfield development [i.e., building projects on completely undeveloped land, such as farmers’ fields] is becoming a conversation, which is sometimes at odds with our climate plan,” observes Ahsan Habib, a professor at Dalhousie University and director of the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory.

The problem with city climate plans

As Canada has become more urbanized, greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian urban communities have declined by 17% from 1990 levels. Meanwhile, emissions from the rural economy – heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, agriculture and intercity transport – have increased by 30% over the same period. Since 2005, moreover, urban emissions have fallen by more than a quarter, while rural emissions from those same sectors have remained stable. Both statistics show that cities are driving Canada’s progress toward its 2030 targets.

Still, there’s a chasm between what municipal climate plans call for and what they actually deliver, and that fact of urban life is not new. Sustainability consultant Jeb Brugmann, the founder of Resilient Cities Catalyst, describes it as “the implementation gap,” adding that this type of shortcoming stems from the fact that municipal climate strategies originally took hold among planners. “Part of the planning conceit,” he says, “is that if you do planning, somehow it triggers implementation.” In his experience, climate plans falter because city officials don’t follow through by then doing the hard work of hacking through the Gordian knot of regulatory and cultural obstacles to change.

Others point out that these strategies may do little more than reinforce actions cities were already taking. A decade ago, then–McGill University geographer Adam Millard-Ball did a deep dive into the climate plans and policies for 600 U.S. cities and concluded that in most cases, they simply reflected the prevailing political preferences of individual cities, and spelled out actions that would have likely happened with or without an overarching strategy. 

“Cities with climate plans have had far greater success in implementing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than their counterparts without such plans,” he wrote in the Journal of Urban Economics. “They have more green buildings, spend more on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and have implemented more programs to divert waste from methane-generating landfills. I find little evidence, however, that climate plans play any causal role in this success.” 

Part of the explanation for the buyer’s regret with climate plans can be found in the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that touch the climate file and make it exceedingly difficult for cities to drive ahead with solutions. In Montreal, mobility-related emissions have remained stubbornly high because the province continues to pour money into highways. While EV adoption is impressive thanks to subsidies and the deployment of charging infrastructure (see p. 38), EV owners will drive instead of taking transit, which remains a far more climate-friendly solution. 

As for energy, Montrealers rely in part on cheap natural gas because Hydro-Québec has long exported the province’s surplus hydro power and relied instead on “peaker plants.” (Even though 94% of the province’s electricity capacity is hydroelectric, fossil fuels account for more than half of all the energy consumed in Quebec.) Rémillard describes Quebeckers’ view of natural gas as “complacent.” In Toronto, the city incentivizes builders to disconnect from natural gas, but the provincial government has continued to expand Enbridge’s gas distribution network. 

[TransformTO] still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.

 

– Sarah Buchanan, Toronto Environmental Alliance

What’s more, the story of hobbled city-driven climate mitigation or adaption plans is also a function of regulatory inertia. In most jurisdictions, for example, building codes – that is, minimum standards for fire and structural safety, energy efficiency, et cetera – are set at the provincial or state level, which means municipalities are limited in how effectively they can push developers, using their own permitting systems, to reduce building-related carbon.

Of course, emissions don’t care about administrative borders. Yet administrative borders determine municipal climate action plans, such as transit investment. The result is that suburban areas, which tend to be car-dependent because of sprawl-oriented planning policies made decades ago, may care much less about spending on transit, not necessarily because their mayors and councils are climate dinosaurs, but because transit infrastructure in low-density areas is incredibly expensive.

The analysis becomes even trickier depending on what type of urban carbon we’re choosing to measure. According to a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability, city climate strategies typically focus on the production of carbon, via tailpipe emissions, energy generation and so on. But if you widen the focus to include consumption-related carbon – for instance, carbon generated by the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods purchased in the city, everything from food to consumer electronics, and including the supply chains that lead to urban markets – the total is considerably higher. Paradoxically, cities with ambitious climate plans may also be wealthier, which means more consumption and thus more carbon.

All of these cross-currents butt up against one of the more dominant strains of climate politics, which is that global cities and their mayors have established themselves at the vanguard of carbon reduction, often in response to the lack of effective policy from national governments. Organizations like the C40, an international network of sustainability-minded cities, work hard to promote ambitious strategies, pilot projects and technologies that have moved the needle in various metropolitan areas. 

Tough questions hover around the achievability of these urban sustainability goals that depend primarily on government investments but lack proper enforcement mechanisms and penalties. Some cities are beginning to think in those terms. At the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Buchanan points out that the City of Toronto is looking at a proposal to compel the owners of larger commercial structures to disclose their carbon consumption – a figure that, theoretically, might cause tenants to think twice about energy-inefficient buildings and the unnecessarily high energy costs they may incur in their lease arrangements. Eventually, she adds, landlords may face fines or fees for failing to upgrade their buildings, but city council hasn’t signed off yet on such a move.

There’s evidence from elsewhere that tougher policies do work. In New York City, for example, Local Law 97, which was enacted in 2019 and comes into effect this year, sets emissions caps on buildings of a certain size, with non-compliant landlords facing hefty fines. The regulation applies to 50,000 properties that exceed 25,000 square feet in total area. City officials say the vast majority of landlords have already moved to comply with the 2024 target reduction, but they’ll have to push even further to satisfy the 2030 benchmark (40% reductions).

The other conundrum is whether overly broad city climate plans become bureaucratically unmanageable because of their breadth of ambition – the “too much body/not enough blanket” problem. Asked to identify the most impactful municipal climate policy, the Ecology Action Centre’s Dunsby replies, “In planning, we call these wicked planning problems.” Halifax’s housing crisis isn’t unique to this city, she adds, “but I do think that focusing housing development in already serviced areas and focusing on trying to build out truly complete communities – mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented development – would truly help to reduce our community-scale emissions.”

A large body of evidence confirms that land-use planning and development that drives density is, in fact, among the most effective ways to cut urban emissions. In a paper published this spring in the journal Cities, an American-Mexican team of geographers scrutinized land-use regulation in 431 urban areas in 40 countries. “Our findings confirm that dense, compact urban areas, with built-up downtowns and shorter roadway segments, have lower per capita carbon emissions,” they concluded, adding that restrictions on intensification, such as the protection of low-rise neighbourhoods, fuels sprawl and all the carbon that sprawl brings.

But both Buchanan and Dunsby caution against the notion that there’s a silver bullet when it comes to decarbonizing cities. “The investment in accelerating housing development and density has to come at the same time as investing in really high-functioning, efficient and reliable transit systems,” Dunsby says.

[Burnaby’s Metrotown is] a very unique hub. That ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.

 

– Jeb Brugmann, founder, Resilient Cities Catalyst

Indeed, Ahsan Habib and many other climate-conscious planners argue that cities need to make decisions on how they grow and develop in lockstep with investments in green transportation infrastructure. “Whenever we are growing certain parts of the city, do we have a plan in place to move those people [and] achieve certain target modal splits [i.e., the proportion of people who travel by transit, bike or foot as opposed to cars]? If we do that, there is no chicken-and-egg problem.”

Brugmann points out that in some cities, strong political leaders have broken down silos that too often stand in the way of urban climate action. He cites the case of Curitiba, Brazil, where a long-serving mayor with no patience for official plans used his power to build an extensive bus rapid-transit network, a formula now in use in many large Latin American cities. 

He also cites examples closer to home, such as Metro Vancouver, where far-sighted planning and investment led, over three decades, to high-density development in the West End and impressive intensification around the expanding SkyTrain network. Brugmann lived for several months in Metrotown – a dense, transit-oriented community in Burnaby that’s grown up over the past two decades or so and seems to be delivering on the vision of a compact, pedestrian-friendly community connected to the region by transit. “It’s a very unique hub,” he says. “I’m telling you, that ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.”

For our spring issue, Corporate Knights looks at a handful of urban indicators – greenhouse gases per capita, tree canopy and EV charging infrastructure – in eight large cities across Canada. Check back here for more city  features from our Spring 2024 issue. 

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

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Epic flooding has killed hundreds of people across Pakistan, India, South Africa, Germany, New York, Kentucky and British Columbia, Canada, in the last year. Intense droughts are parching landscapes and wilting crops across Texas, the U.S. West and the Horn of Africa. As these water extremes hit more and more people where they live, there’s a growing awareness that climate change is water change.

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Some cities are doing better than others, but, “I am amazed at their overall lack of preparedness to limit the potential for flooding and to not suffer unduly when floods do occur,” says Blair Feltmate, a professor in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Waterloo, who led the research study funded by The Co-operators Group Ltd. insurance company.

The report, “Preparedness of Fifteen Canadian Cities to Limit Flood Damage,” is part of a project that, according to Feltmate, is intended “to motivate cites to be more proactive and to lower their risk profile from flooding so insurers can continue to offer affordable coverage.”

It’s a first look at the issue in Canada, he says. “Relatively little effort has gone into what are the key areas of vulnerability, and what we need to do to mitigate them. First we need to recognize the challenges; then, we need to address them.”

The researchers interviewed a total of 60 officials from 15 cities, selected because they are large, encompass Canada’s different geographic areas, and are instrumental in supporting regional, provincial or national economic continuity.

Every city was graded – from a low of E to a high of A for each of 16 issues related to their existing or planned preparedness for flooding events. Those 16 grades were then used to determine an overall grade. Ottawa came out on top, with a grade of A-, closely followed by Winnipeg, at B+. Halifax trailed the pack with a D grade.

Almost every Canadian city is prone to flooding: They are, after all, built in river valleys or beside lakes or oceans. But the risk is growing as climate change leads to more frequent intense rainfall events and, in a few places, increased and rapid snow melt. Calgary, Mississauga and Toronto all experienced severe flooding in 2013, and most of the 15 cities in the study have had major floods during this decade.

“What constitutes a one-in-100-year flood now is really only one in 20, due to changes in the intensity of storm events,” Feltmate says. “In close to all cases, cities do not possess flood-plain maps for the kind of storms we get today, let alone those we’ll experience 25 or 30 years from now.”

Much of the destruction these storms cause is from floodwater flowing overland, for which insurance coverage is not offered in Canada.

The Co-operators and the University of Waterloo embarked on the project to determine whether steps could be taken to reduce the impacts of this overland flooding so that the insurance industry might be more inclined to offer coverage for it.

In the first phase, senior executives from Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry identified 14 initiatives that could create such a situation.

In the second phase, an advisory roundtable known as Partners for Action – comprised of people from the insurance industry and government, flood risk experts, professional associations, business and law – set three “winning conditions” that must be established to help reduce flood risk. Using them as guidance, they whittled the 14 conditions from the first phase down to a priority list.

Determining the level of flood preparedness in major Canadian cities was identified as one of the priorities, which, in turn, led Co-operators to engage Feltmate to conduct the study, the first of many on de-risking cities. Ongoing collaboration of Partners For Action stakeholders will include calculating the economist costs and benefits of adaptation, determining the social and environmental co-benefits, and emphasizing the need for improved flood mapping across Canada.

Sewer backups rising

This first report doesn’t relate to insurance protection for overland flooding. But storms do lead to sewer backups into basements, which many policies do cover. And across the country, in nine of the past 11 years, claims for such damage have exceeded the premiums paid, Feltmate says.

Reducing backup damage is essential to keep the cost of this insurance under control, he says. “If cities become increasingly risky, premiums and deductibles will go up and the cap limits will get lower.”

Almost all 15 cities did well on what Feltmate calls a “big ticket” group of issues. This means they had:

• Up-to-date flood plain maps;
• Land-use plans that attempt to control or protect development in flood-prone areas;
• Consistent efforts to improve urban drainage, such as ensuring that culverts, sewer grates and storm sewer systems remain clear and promoting “green” solutions to reduce storm water run-off;
• Policies that support the installation in new construction of backflow valves, which prevent sewage backup into residential basements.

Scores varied for other measures, such as management of the water supply and raw sewage, and identification and funding of emergency responders.

But in what the report terms “areas of outstanding challenge,” most of the cities lag. These include encouraging the retrofit of backflow valves on existing homes, as well as a series of issues that many cities contend are not municipal responsibilities — e.g. measures to ensure that during floods, transportation and communication networks continue to operate, and electricity, petroleum, banking services and retail food remain available.

“Cities would say, ‘that’s important but it’s not our responsibility’,” Feltmate says. “But if something goes wrong, they’ll be blamed for not coordinating and managing the situation.”

Adding to the risk, some municipal politicians, under pressure from developers and the public, continue to approve construction in areas that officials recommend be restricted due to flood risk, Feltmate says. “There still is an element of the citizenry that says, ‘we want to live near water. We’ve been in the city 25 years and have never seen a flood.’ Often, the politicians will acquiesce,” particularly since new construction boosts property tax revenues.

But that attitude is changing, he says. On a scale of zero to 100, five years ago the politicians would have received a mediocre score of 50 for allowing development where it shouldn’t occur. “Today, it’s around 80.”

In addition to urging progress on “big ticket” items, the report advises municipal leaders to act on the areas they now say are outside their responsibility, like the provincially controlled 400-series expressways in Toronto, and Vancouver’s provincially operated electric system.

Mayors, for example, could bring together the service providers to produce flood preparation plans, Feltmate says. That’s especially true for Toronto, the country’s largest city. “The ramifications of it failing would be felt across Canada. Toronto has a heightened responsibility to be ahead of the curve, which they’re not answering.”

Cities must also step up education programs, including making homeowners aware of subsidies for backflow valves, the report states. It found that homeowners haven’t been taking advantage of the subsidies, because they don’t understand the function and importance of backwater valves, or haven’t realized subsidies were available.

“The Co-operators is committed to working with Canadians to ensure they understand the risk associated with flooding and have strategies for protecting themselves and their properties,” says Rob Wesseling, executive vice-president of The Co-operators’ property and casualty insurance products and chief operating officer of The Sovereign General Insurance Company.

“Professor Feltmate’s report and recommendations provide a great benchmark for municipalities as they work to protect their communities and citizens.”

On Monday, The Co-operators launched a new insurance coverage product that can protect homeowners in Alberta against damage caused by overland flooding, such as flooding caused by an overflow from a body of water, sewer/water backup and accumulation of surface water caused by heavy rain.

“Planning is currently underway to make the product available across the country,” the company said.

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