How the USA is Preparing for Heatwaves with Cool Roofs
How US cities are preparing for more life-threatening heatwaves
Officials from Portland, New York, Miami and Phoenix discuss plans to keep residents safe in extreme heat.
Based on articles out of the USA and Europe regarding heatwaves, we asked the question here in Australia what’s happening to manage future heatwaves and using cool roofs here in Australia. We understanding heatwaves are about managing the environment, water, infrastructure however our focus is cool roofs and cool surfaces.
The seriously hot cities like Phoenix can serve as a kind of laboratory for how cities can adapt to a heating planet. In addition to increasing tree cover, the city is looking at cool roofs and cool pavements—coating these surfaces with reflective paint so they absorb less heat—as ways to bring down temperatures.
Even in a city where residents are accustomed to extreme heat, Hondula said messaging and education are crucial to saving lives. “We can monitor babies from our smartphone on the other side of the country and we can feed our pets treats remotely,” he said. “There’s no reason we should be having people fall through cracks [because they don’t realize] it’s just simply too hot in their home. We ought to be able to detect those cases in one form or another.”
New York is the same. In her previous role, in the city’s climate resiliency office, Charles-Guzman developed the city’s first-ever heat adaptation plan. The plan focused on growing the city’s tree canopy in poor neighbourhoods, expanding the use of cool roofs to reduce building energy costs and consumption, combating isolation through a buddy system and distributing air conditioning to low-income households.
She said 10 years ago many in the environmental movement attacked her for distributing air conditioners, calling it a maladaptation to climate change. “Mechanical cooling is necessary in a climate-changing world. We need better, cleaner sources of energy, but we cannot meet our GHG emissions reduction goals on the backs of the poorest people,” she said.
