Bridging the Research-Policy Divide: Lessons from Cities Tackling Extreme Heat
Held on Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Watch a full recording of the event, or scroll down to read a recap and watch event highlights.
Recap by Diya Ashtakala
On Tuesday, April 5th, the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC), the Boston University School of Public Health Program on Climate and Health and the URBAN Program hosted a webinar to highlight the problem of urban heat in different cities and potential solutions to heat mitigation by reducing the gap between research and practice.
Moderated by IOC Co-Director Katherine Lusk, the event featured Daphne Lundi, Deputy Director for Social Resiliency at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resiliency; Karen Smith, Partner at Healthy Community Ventures and former Director of California Department of Public Health; and David Hondula, Chief Heat Officer for the City of Phoenix and Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Greg Wellenius, Director of the Program on Climate and Health and Professor in the Department of Environmental Health made opening remarks about how heat is a public health problem.
The panelists spoke about measures available at their disposal to tackle heat, what success looks like, the impact of local action on research, and providing support to vulnerable populations.
Tools to tackling urban heat
Daphne Lundi discussed New York’s first cool cities plan in 2017 that focused on “two buckets” aimed at heat resiliency. One bucket targeted green infrastructure investment, such as increasing tree canopies in vulnerable neighborhoods and active cooling centers. Another was understanding heat associated risk in terms of pre-summer training opportunities and preparedness before a heat wave, especially for older and socially isolated populations. Lundi also emphasized the importance of legislative work in terms of constructing a climate agenda that can bring in necessary investment.
David Hondula spoke about Arizona’s new heat response and mitigation office to address the increasing number of heat related deaths. Talking about the tools that they have, Hondula mentioned persuasion: The office persuades departments with larger budgets to implement heat conscious programs. Another tool that Hondula believes should be adopted is sharing information between providers who are doing heat-related work. “There are a lot of easy gaps to connect thus far between provider A and provider B who are both doing something heat relevant. Can we just have a shared information resource between the two of them for example?” Hondula also believes that good individual leadership and small grants to counties can also be effective tools.
Karen Smith explained that “public health’s role is to look at risks to population health so not necessarily individuals, but whole populations and to identify those risks and then attempt to prevent the negative health outcomes of those health risks. So, overall, our focus is on prevention.” She discussed several tools such as data science information and surveillance to help monitor research data. Another tool includes communicating risks to the public and to the rest of the government. “It’s the kind of information public health can use in risk communications that say hey, reach out to your neighbors, especially if they live alone, do you know somebody, call them, see how they’re doing, check on them. The same thing can be said for first responder entities as well.” Response plans are also an integral tool to tackle urban heat because they help to identify the worst impact and what we can do to mitigate it.
Achieving success
“I think the way I approach the work is figuring out how we’re minimizing harm so you know minimizing the number of people who are hospitalized, trying to address the numbers of heat mortality rates that we know happen every summer,” said Lundi about what success would look like. She stated that we need to start thinking about long term strategies in terms of what we can do now.
Thinking about the future as well, Hondula said “I see a world where the heat office doesn’t need a budget, where it may not need a heat office at all.” Hondula sees a successful future where cooling centers aren’t necessary. He praised programs such as those at BU on climate and health, where students are trained to take on roles in local leadership capacities where heat mitigation becoming mainstream is a possibility. Lundi further added that mainstreaming heat resiliency would be a good precedent to set, similar to what we see on the east coast where municipalities are thinking about flood resiliency.
Smith sees success at the policy level when it aligns with the priorities of the state, and other policies such as climate change, housing and land use. Smith also stated that research and evaluation is important for success because we are yet to fully understand the major effects of exposure to heat. “Each time there is a heat event or sustained heat we should be gathering data, but we don’t really do that.” She believes there needs to be increased data gathering on people who go to medical facilities for heat related illnesses. She believes that public health workers should check in with patients to see if they are socially isolated and whether they have amenities to sustain the heat wave as a way to collect data.
Local action and community-based organizations
Hondula highlighted how community-based organizations are driving the evidence needed for research and intervention. He spoke about community groups in Arizona that were carrying out heat relief outreach such as distributing water bottles and wanted to do more outreach in city parks. They were confident that they could reduce the number of heat stroke cases. Hondula said, “I’ve been working with climate and health data for a little while now and that was the first time a group had come forward with that measure, they said we got in the way of a specific number of heatstroke cases and we’re using that as an argument to get a permit or whatever sort of permission we need.” He said that getting data on fire department intervention and how many cases were kept out of hospitals could be used to approach the city council for greater investment. “Right now, it’s really interesting to me that those data came to use from community-based organizations.” Community organizations have the available data points needed which can be used to implement better strategies.
Smith emphasized that partnerships at the local level and with nonprofit organizations who help vulnerable populations are integral to the work done at the city level. It provides the city with important data on the impact of urban heat beyond health. Smith provided the example of a heat emergency in the Central Valley in California ten years ago in a small county. When the local health official gathered data, a critical distinguisher was social isolation and not diseases or cooling amenities. Smith stated that this has proven to be true in many instances and that this data is important especially in close knit communities. Lundi mentioned a program to help address social isolation called “Be A Buddy” where people would call their neighbors to check up on them during a heart wave. “I think being able to sort of communicate the impact of connectedness is something I think we’re still working on getting a handle on,” said Lundi.
Vulnerable Populations
Hondula stated that in Phoenix, 65% of heat related deaths were among the unsheltered. “An unsheltered neighbor is at 200 to 300 times higher risk of heat associated death than somebody who has regular housing.” Smith highlighted the problem of acute emergencies over long stretches of high temperatures among the unhoused because they may also have underlying medical problems, mental illness,and substance abuse. “You don’t have to exceed the heat emergency level to cause real problems for people with significant medical illness over a period of days.” These are the kind of deaths that are usually missed, Smith explained. She said that there is no solution to this yet, and we need to figure out how to gather this data.
Lundi mentioned New York City’s code red activation where unhoused people are provided with water and directed to cooling centers. However, in the long term, there needs to be affordable housing available to these people. “I think what a lot of research tells us is that people want to stay home because they want to be home, they want to be in a place that’s familiar to them or comfortable to them and so to the extent that we can be promoting safe indoor cooling particularly for folks who have the fewest options in terms of cooling.” Hondula agreed, saying that housing is an important investment to heat response. “The city is an actor in the market and one of the pieces of information we need is which buildings are available to us to lease, operate and or purchase to create more shelter space and or affordable housing.”