Urban heat governance: examining the role of urban planning

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

ABSTRACTHeat is an increasing climate risk for cities due to climate change and the urban heat island effect. Extreme heat has inequitable impacts across social, economic, and urban environmental systems. Despite increasing awareness of heat risk, the planning and governance structures for mitigating and managing heat are less understood than those for other climate risks. We studied five large, climatically-diverse U.S. cities to better understand urban heat governance with a focus on the field of urban planning. We first conducted a plan evaluation of these cities' comprehensive, climate action, and hazard mitigation plans (n = 14) and then interviewed urban planners, resilience professionals, hazard mitigation planners, emergency managers, and public health professionals (n = 22). We found that aspects of heat planning occur across a variety of municipal plans but only a small number of strategies were explicitly framed in terms of heat, suggesting an opportunity to better connect heat with other policy goals. Urban planners tended to play a backseat role relative to other professions, despite the field's importance for reducing heat-related inequity. Better understanding the role of urban planning within broader governance structures can help policymakers to best engage in heat mitigation and management.KEYWORDS: Extreme heatheat planningheat governanceclimate changeurban heatheat resilience AcknowledgementsWe thank Alexander Varni and Ally Marecek for their excellent research assistance. We also thank the interviewees for their participation and insights.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Baltimore's Code Red program is activated by the health commissioner when the heat index is expected to reach or exceed 105°F (Martin, Citation2016). Houston's Emergency Heat Plan is activated by the city when the head index reaches 108°F for two consecutive days (City of Houston, Citationn.d.). In both Baltimore and Houston, once the plans are activated, additional resources such as cooling centers, transportation to cooling centers, and heat-health messaging are made available.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Program Office through Grant #NA17OAR4310288 with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest program at the University of Arizona.Notes on contributorsLadd KeithLadd Keith is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at The University of Arizona.C.J. GabbeC.J. Gabbe is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Santa Clara University.Erika SchmidtErika Schmidt is a Master of Architecture graduate student at The University of Arizona.