Rx for hot cities: Building climate resilience through urban greening and cooling in Los Angeles, California, USA
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Extreme heat and its health impacts are on the rise. Globally, the six warmest years on record all occurred since 2015, and in Los Angeles (LA) average temperatures are expected to increase up to 4.5°C in coming decades. Extreme heat causes more deaths in the United States than all other weather-related causes combined, with heat risk being most pronounced in urban areas due to the heat-island effect. Reducing urban heat exposure is an equity issue, as low-income communities and communities of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods with older buildings, low tree canopy cover, more heat-retaining surfaces, and limited access to coping strategies such as air conditioning. The Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative (LAUCC) is a multi-disciplinary partnership of researchers and expert practitioners working with communities and government to understand and mitigate heat in LA. LAUCC completed a modeling study of current and projected heat in LA County to: 1) identify geographic areas with highest vulnerability to heat-related death; 2) quantify how various urban forest cover (UFC) and built environment albedo scenarios would affect heat-related mortality, temperature, humidity, and oppressive air masses that lead to elevated mortality; and 3) quantify the number of years that climate change-induced warming could be delayed by implementing these interventions. We find that increasing shade, evaporative cooling, and albedo through increases in UFC and reflective surfaces could save one in four lives lost to heat waves in Los Angeles, mostly in low-income communities and communities of color. We also find that these measures could modify local meteorology sufficiently to delay local effects of global climate change-induced warming by 25 to 60 years under business-as-usual and moderate mitigation scenarios, respectively. These strategies can be adapted to combat extreme heat in other regions that are experiencing similar challenges.
Keywords: Human health and well-being, Research, Sustainable forest management, Adaptive and integrated management, Climate change
ID: 3479653