As Heatwaves and Floods Hit Cities Worldwide, These Places Are Pioneering Solutions
Sourced from FloodList
Climate change is going just as badly for cities as we have been warned it would. Extreme weather is increasingly common and severe globally. Australian cities have endured a number of recent disastrous events.
It’ll get worse, too. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) factsheet outlining impacts on human settlements is a very sobering read. It also pithily sums up the situation cities face:
Concentrated risk and concentrated opportunity for action.
Implicit in this wording is a hopeful truth: adapting to climate change is a daunting task, but the “how” is not a mystery. The opportunity is right in front of us, in our streets, buildings and parklands. Around the world we are seeing effective retrofitting of cities to adapt to more extreme weather.
Here are a few inspiring exemplars.
Keeping the city cool
Planting trees to create shade is an obvious response to hot weather. However, in many cities it’s still a struggle just to stop the losses of trees. Future hot, dry climates will add to the challenge of urban greening.
Medellin in Colombia is one city making inspiring progress on this front. With an urban greening budget of US$16.3 million, it has created a network of 30 “green corridors” through the city. These have reduced urban heat island effects by 2℃ three years into the program. As these densely vegetated corridors mature, they are expected to eventually deliver 4-5℃ of cooling.
Vienna, Austria, has had an urban heat island strategy in place since 2018. It includes planting 4,500 trees each year and subsidies for street-facing green walls.
The city has developed a series of “cool streets” – traffic-calmed spaces with light-coloured road surfaces, “fog showers” that activate on hot days, water features, shade trees and drinking fountains. Eighteen cool streets were delivered as pop-ups, with another four in place permanently to provide refuges on hot days. Vienna also has an extensive network of public swimming pools where residents can cool off.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
