Urban Heat Resilience
PAS QuickNotes 95
By Ladd Keith, Sara Meerow
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Heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, posing a growing and inequitable threat to human health, infrastructure, and economic and ecological systems. Communities are getting hotter due to climate change and the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Cities across the country must prepare for unprecedented heat and address systemic inequities in heat risk.
Planners considering urban heat resilience should work to help their communities equitably prepare for and adapt to both chronic and acute heat risk through heat mitigation and management. Heat mitigation includes design and planning strategies that aim to reduce the built environment’s contribution to urban heat, whereas heat management strategies prepare for and respond to heat.
This edition of PAS QuickNotes explains national trends in extreme heat and describes how planners can enhance urban heat resilience for their communities through planning and implementing heat mitigation and management strategies.
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About the Authors
Ladd Keith
<p>Ladd Keith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning and a faculty research associate at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. An urban planner by training, he has over a decade of experience planning for climate change with diverse stakeholders in cities across the U.S. His research explores heat policy and governance to help communities increase their heat resilience. He is the UA lead of the Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) funded by the Department of Energy, the heat research lead of the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with additional research funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Transportation. He also founded and led the Sustainable Built Environments undergraduate degree program which is offered in person, fully online, and globally in Peru and Ecuador. He has a Ph.D. in Arid Lands Resource Sciences and an M.S. in Planning from the University of Arizona.</p>
Sara Meerow
Sara Meerow, PHD, is an associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of urban planning and geography to tackle the challenge of making cities more resilient to climate change and other social and environmental hazards in a way that is sustainable and just. Her current research focuses on conceptualizations of urban resilience, climate change adaptation planning with a focus on heat and flooding, and green infrastructure planning in a range of cities across the U.S. and internationally. To date she has published more than 45 articles in academic journals, in addition to several book chapters, reports, and popular press articles on these topics. She also co-authored the APA PAS Report 600: Planning for Urban Heat Resilience. She currently co-leads the NOAA-supported Center for Heat Resilient Communities. She has a PhD in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan and an MS in International Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam.