Heating up: Climate change policy and funding tools for adapting to urban heat

Climate change is making already hot urban areas even hotter. Vulnerable populations, including the elderly, young children, and the poor, are more susceptible to respiratory disease, heat stroke, and other health problems and less likely to be able to afford air conditioning. To protect these residents, cities are changing their built environments to reduce the effects of urban heat before it endangers lives: using cool roofs, green roofs, cool pavements, and urban forestry. Individually, each of these policies can help individuals adapt to urban heat; taken together, citywide adoption can drastically reduce the urban heat island itself, while providing co-benefits such as improved air quality and stormwater management. The Georgetown Climate Center has created a toolkit providing guidelines for local policymakers to choose which policy tools work best for their particular economic, environmental, and other circumstances, and to decide which legal tools (zoning, building codes, tax incentives, etc.) work best to increase their use. Drawing on our experience creating this tool kit, we have assisted local governments with 1) choosing the most appropriate tools given their environmental and public health priorities, and 2) assessing which tools are available to them under their current legal authority. In addition, in this era of stretched state and local budgets we have begun identifying and evaluating sources of funding to pay for this work, as well as financing structures to create the largest impact possible with those funds. Through this session, we hope that participants can take the tools available, the funding analysis, and the lessons learned in local jurisdictions around the country and begin to keep their own vulnerable citizens healthier and safer.