It is to nobody’s surprise that 2024 has a high chance of being the hottest year on record, just as 2023 was. Across the globe last year, heat indexes reached intolerable levels and forced entire cities to shut down. The Persian Gulf region of Iran spiked to 165°F in July 2023, a figure well above the month’s average, which sparked a nationwide shut down due to health and infrastructure concerns. In the U.S., the National Weather Service issued high heat alerts for over one third of the country to warn communities about temperatures exceeding 100°F.
Not only does extreme heat cause or exacerbate other natural disasters, it also causes more deaths than other weather-related disasters. The National Weather Service estimates that heat kills more than twice as many people as hurricanes and tornadoes combined yet receives much less attention. In 2022, Europe’s extreme heat led to the death of over 60,000 people.
While air conditioning can offer some respite, it both exacerbates the overall climate change crisis through increased greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not an option for much of the developing world. Given this constraint, what kinds of alternative or nature-based solutions, particularly for urban areas, can help?
One of the most prominent issues associated with extreme heat is the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). The UHI effect describes the phenomenon when air and surface temperatures in urban landscapes are drastically higher than the surrounding rural areas. Climatologists’ credit this to the replacement of natural ground cover, like forests, with a built environment constructed of materials that absorb and trap heat. Thus, as urbanization occurs, cities experience higher temperatures and greater rates of heat-related illnesses.
In order to deal with even more extreme temperatures in urban environments, the United Nations Environment Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change categorize solutions into two areas: nature-based mitigation and nature-based adaptation.
Nature-based solutions are urban planning concepts such as increased greenery, lighter colored streets, and ‘green’ roofs. These initiatives reflect heat away from the surface instead of absorbing it which in turn keeps the average temperatures of cities cooler. Adaptation approaches find ways to immediately provide relief to people through environmentally conscious programs such as splash parks, shade centers, and public pools.
Mitigation solutions, alternatively, focus on greenhouse gas reduction, but they are also much slower to implement. Tree canopies can take years to reach maturity and other infrastructure projects require intensive resources. With extreme heat worsening every year it is critical to provide immediate relief to communities where there is no time to wait.
During times of intense heat (>90°F) the WHO recommends staying in temperatures below 89°F during the day and around 75° at night. But this solution is nearly impossible to implement as much of the world, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries that struggle with access to consistent and reliable electricity, cannot access air conditioning regularly or at all.
Energy experts also emphasize the importance of implementing more sustainable cooling interventions that provide relief to communities but do not further increase greenhouse gas emissions. Household/personal air conditioning units create a toxic feedback loop that exacerbates climate change. Individual AC units are responsible for nearly 7 percent of global GHG emissions today, which many organizations call a market failure due to the amount of low-emission cooling alternatives available today.
One viable solution that is being implemented in the U.S. are cooling centers. As many Americans can attest, public cooling centers have become more commonplace as temperatures consistently rise into the triple digits. Cooling centers or cooling shelters are any air-conditioned facility designated as a site to provide respite during extreme heat. This may include government-owned buildings or private businesses, with some states in the U.S. even setting up cooling sites in outdoor tents.
With over 50 registered cooling centers in California alone, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has included them in their Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) framework as an effective way to protect the public from heat stroke. So, what would they represent in a region where air conditioning is difficult to obtain? Life and death.
Not only are cooling centers necessary to provide relief from the fatal heat, but they also offer a unique opportunity to engage the private sector in adaptation programs. Attaching solar panels and other energy-efficient technology, such as heat pumps, evaporative cooling, and green roofs, has the potential to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and prevent further marginalization of vulnerable communities by providing them with access to affordable cooling.
The CDG’s November 2022 report, Catalyzing Climate Results with Pull Finances, praises these new cooling technologies as a way to expand access to air conditioning in lower- and middle-income countries because it can cut the amount of energy needed to run by 45 percent. With proper revenue streams, cooling centers, particularly combined with nature-based adaptation solutions, could initiate private-sector incentives and provide people with the ability to safely work through heat waves.
