Dive Brief:
- To help communities better prepare for worsening extreme heat, the Biden administration announced May 20 it has provided $4.55 million to establish research centers on heat monitoring and heat resilience.
- The centers will be based in Durham, North Carolina, and Los Angeles. The Durham center will focus on supporting community science and other forms of heat data collection, while the LA center will determine the best strategies for local heat mitigation and management.
- The researchers plan to “take the best practices that we've seen quickly develop in some places, take the best science and research being conducted and translate that into actionable policies that communities can do on the ground," Ladd Keith, co-lead of the Los Angeles-based center and University of Arizona associate professor, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Extreme heat, the deadliest type of extreme weather in the U.S., has received growing attention from policymakers as climate change makes summers hotter than ever. Last year was the warmest in the 174 years that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been keeping track, and the agency predicts this year has a one-in-three chance of being even hotter.
States and cities are scrambling to catch up, creating heat response plans, holding planning summits and appointing chief heat officers. Many cities have opened cooling center networks while others are passing policies to give outdoor workers heat protections. Also gaining traction are long-term efforts to reduce the urban heat island effect, such as increasing shade-providing tree canopy and installing cool pavement and roof coatings that absorb less heat.
Despite this rising interest in heat response, most governments have historically lacked “a comprehensive or coordinated set of strategies to deal with heat and its impacts,” V. Kelly Turner, lead of the LA-based Center for Heat Resilient Communities and associate director of University of California, Los Angeles’ Luskin Center for Innovation, said in an email. That’s why the center is developing a framework to identify and evaluate heat resilience policies, protocols and lessons.
“The ad hoc approach is important, but not sufficient to meet the scale and scope of the problem,” Turner said. The center aims to address key questions about how communities can improve emergency response during extreme heat, how to account for the costs and benefits of heat mitigation strategies and what an effective, equitable heat resilience plan looks like, she said.
Equipped with $2.25 million in federal funding, the LA center will also fund 30 communities over three years, Turner said. “The grant will not fund hard infrastructure projects, rather, we envision providing technical support and leveraging funding to kickstart heat resilience planning,” she said.
The Durham-based Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring will include additional hubs nationwide, including in Phoenix, Boston and Portland, Oregon. “This will enable work to engage regional communities and connect with existing networks for public education and engagement,” a NOAA news release says. It will be funded with $2.3 million in federal dollars.
Both centers said they will announce how communities can apply to be involved later this year.
