I'm Ray Quay. I'm with D CDC at Arizona State University. Um I'm gonna
have Mark come up and make some welcoming comments here right away and
then Chuck is going to introduce why you're here and what a SU is gonna do
for you today. So Mark, take it away. Thank you. Thank you. Um No, thank
you for coming today. Uh So yeah, as uh I don't know if you all of, you
know, me uh Chief ST officer here at the city and this topic of urban heat
in Phoenix. Uh It's really been interesting as we study and talk about
with EPA and the all studies lead back here. So much research has been
done uh here in Phoenix. It's really the epicenter of all research related
urban heat. Uh And one of the things, it's interesting a number of months
ago, um Michael Crow, the head of a SU called Ed and said, you know, we
really need to get our researchers together and take action on this urban
heat. And it's really been now something a top priority for the city to
say, let's really look at this. There's been um historically, a really a
potpourri around the city of research and of pilot projects that city
departments have done and really saying, what is it, we can pull together.
And I think the concept of I'd like to say to you sit back, relax and
hear this uh rapid fire presentations. But actually, we don't, we want you
actually to engage, to think of how, what ideas and, and the way to have
come up with innovation is you take two really good ideas and put them
together. And so we really want you to see that the research that's been
done and say, is there any way to apply this and things of the city? I
mean, we have a $32 billion transportation 2050 plan rolling out. Is there
a way while we do that, that we can actually employ some of these uh
techniques and ideas that you'll see presented as we have in just in
streets alone, 2 billion as part of transportation in repaving our streets
between now and 2050 80% of them. Is there a way what we can do with our
streets, our sidewalks, our parking lots, our buildings uh that can really
have this effect. So let the ideas uh be the whole time engaged to say,
how can we apply these and what can we do to have a cohesive strategy,
citywide to really lower uh urban heat. And I guess the last area is um
that we wanna be thinking about is it's actually heat really
disproportionately affects some areas of Phoenix, particularly South and
West Phoenix vulnerable populations. And so, uh really implementing some
of those first uh in those neighborhoods and really look at, uh I think
it's been described by some as instead of xeriscape zero escape uh in a
lot of South Phoenix. And how do we really change that uh to really cool
it. Um One of the most interesting, I don't know if we're hearing about
this research today, but we're studied two neighborhoods just two miles
apart and it was a 13 degree average surface temperature difference
between those two neighborhoods, 13 degrees. So really saying how it's a
great value in employing some of these uh can make a real difference. So,
thank you. Uh welcome and uh looking forward to your ideas and I think
we'll have Chuck from a su here, introduce us to uh sort of the format of
this morning. Thank you. So I'm, I'm gonna introduce Chuck and Chuck is a
very humble guy, but I need all of, you know, that Chuck is pretty much a
legend at a SU. He's kind of the founder of some of the major
environmental programs we have. So Chuck take it away. Thank you, Ray. And
thanks, Mark. Um As Mark said, there's a long history of research on heat
both by the city of Phoenix by a SU. Um What our hope is is that this is
um going to move this activity to the next level. What the next level is,
is as much up to you as it is up to a su. But somehow we want to make
projects more comprehensive, break down the silos part of that is at a su
do more interdisciplinary approaches to these things. And for some of us,
including me, there'll be things that I was unaware of that. I know I'm
gonna hear about today and that'll be exciting and I'm hopeful that it'll
be the same for you and that'll be the same across your departments as
well. Um The first step in this collaboration uh has been taken, you
haven't quite got it yet, but Mark has promised me, Caitlin Burle Burwell
, an A su intern in his office has collected at least the first go at the
history of projects done in the city of Phoenix by the city. And so we're
hoping we'll get to distribute that to you. We'll link it to our online
site we'll be talking about during the morning uh that we hope becomes a
resource for you as well as for us. Uh the next step. So there is a sort
of compendium of what the city's been doing. The next step is today this
morning. And that's to give you not an exhaustive, but at least a tasting
menu of what A SU is doing right now. Sort of the emphasis here is on
diversity of things not on that, you fully understand each project
presented because we've only allow 4 to 5 minutes. Uh And we'll be pretty
strict about that. Um Hopefully, what that's going to do is position
ourselves both in the short term to collaborate on actual projects that
you have in the pipeline already and moving soon. And hopefully we can
help in some way. And that's what today and this morning's about and you
notice we're split into three sections. There isn't a, an absolute order
to the world in those sections, but we're trying to divide things up. But
at the end of each of those three, short groups of papers, we open up some
time for you to reflect and ask and say, would this make sense for
something I'm doing? Here's something I'm doing that you haven't thought
about and so forth. So we're trying to interdigitate what a su is doing
with 10 or 12 minutes for you to react and say what you think is relevant
going to it. Um Part of this whole procedure is just getting together and
sharing ideas. The other part is sort of coming up with some statements
and one of those sets of statements and if I can use this, it'll work. OK.
No.
Oh yes. One of those in the typing small enough that it doesn't matter is
a set of principles that I think we'll need to agree on. But basically,
and they're not surprising and mark already said a number of them is in
the first one is the biggest one for me. I think most people say it's,
it's hot in Phoenix. There it is. I can't do anything about it. Well, it's
getting hotter. It's in the 30 odd years I've lived here, the morning
temperatures have skyrocketed. The, the daytime highs aren't that much
radically different, but the number of days over 100 is radically
different. So we are moving, it is getting hotter. I think we all need to
take an oath that something can be done about this. I mean, if not, and I
think this is what drives certainly the city manager, if not, it is a
threat to the future vitality of this city and we can't let that happen. I
intend to be here and retire here and I can't let my real estate values go
down so that let's, we can deal with that. Um The second is a point mark
brought up and that is, it doesn't affect everyone. Equally different
neighborhoods are, have radically different experiences uh, with urban
Heat Island in particular. Uh, and we can do something about that. That,
that is addressable. We need the will, we need to know what it is, you
know, a fair amount about what has worked and not work. We know other
things about what could work and might work. Uh We need to get together on
that and in all of this, we need to set some priorities and that's going
to be more your business than our business. We might open the door to what
we think can and can't be done. Uh, but you have to walk in and say this
is what's important to us. Is it the hottest areas we deal with first? Is
it the most vulnerable populations? And I heard that, uh, that we need to
sort of rescue and, and it's low hanging fruit in a lot of these cases, uh
some tree planting and Richard knows what to do, um could make all the
difference for them. And so we need to look there. Uh but we need to go
beyond just uh shade trees. I think we need to start talking about a city
of a future where we want people to be able to walk in the summer. I mean
, it, our sidewalks are not cool zones. We need, we want people to
assemble for meetings for music, for outdoor uh farmers markets. Uh We
need to make cool areas in the city where people can be cool areas to
approach bus stops and to be at them or our all our energy at rapid
transit won't work. Um And the biggest thing is um if we're going to do
that, uh we need people behind it, obviously the people in this room, a Su
city of Phoenix staff and, and directors. Um but we also need um the
general public and I actually think that they're ready. I think we see it
more and more this year in the news more than ever before. I mean, the
heat wave at a city like San Francisco, they even thought in Seattle they
had a heat wave. Um, these are amazing things. These are capturing
people's ideas and I think, uh we a su and particularly the city of
Phoenix can be in the national limelight for something good. Uh, And I
think it's, it, it's an opportunity that we are sort of a canary in a coal
mine. It is hot here, by the way, even today is a little hot though it was
very pleasant coming down here. Um We can set the tone, we can set some
guidelines and what could be done. Um I don't really need the slides. Oops
, you can't read those. OK. Uh This is the one saying we need people
behind it. Um But I would like to believe that at the end of today, we
will be collaborating on 23 or four short term on the ground projects
happening. But I also want us to lay the foundation for, for making
Phoenix uh the leader nationally and potentially internationally in
addressing heat. Urban heat is AAA problem of the 21st century for
probably 40% of the global population. And we are in a position to uh set
the tone for that. And I think um we do it for ourselves, but we also can
do it uh uh for the rest of the world. So I'm looking forward to these
presentations and um hopefully we'll be able not just to learn but to um
get together on a lot of them.
Ok. So, as has been mentioned, we have a whole series, 16 different rapid
fire presentations that we're gonna present you today. We've grouped them
into a topical areas. Um, the agendas on the table give you an idea of
what those topical areas are. After each to, uh, after the lightning talks
for each topic, we're gonna have 10 minutes for discussion. Uh If anybody
has some clarifying question that they really are compelled to ask, we'll
go ahead and answer there, but we really want to spend our time in you
discussing how does, what was just presented, what you heard relate to
what you do here at the city of Phoenix. And let me assure you, everybody
in this room is affected by, um, the urban heat, extreme heat, urban Heat
Island, there isn't anybody in here that isn't going to be affected in
some way by that. And so it's important for you. We want you to be
thinking about that. How does it affect what I do and how can we use this
to try to help us adapt to the urban heat? Um And if you are interested,
if you have a, if you don't want to ask a question because you're, you,
you feel like Well, he just said those compelling questions, those
clarified. Now mine's not that important. We have a, a piece of paper at
the table, several pieces of paper that you can write your question down
on or if you want to reach out to one of the researchers to make a
connection with them, which we encourage you to do. You can also do that
with this piece of paper, mark on it. Who you would like to contact, put
your name and your email address on there and we'll connect you with those
people. So any questions at all about how we're gonna get started today,
particularly from the speakers, all the speakers you all understand five
minutes. You have five minutes. OK. All right. All right. OK. So let's get
started. I'm gonna introduce David Sailor, who's with the School of
Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at a Su David.
All right. Thank you. And uh I understand that as a kickoff talk. Each
session, we eight minutes, right? You think about? All right. So I'll
speak fast. So, um my, my goal in this presentation is to start by sort of
kicking off this session on urban form materials and composition and how
they affect urban heat uh with some sort of a broad overview and then I'll
get into some specific research of my own on this topic. So let me jump
right in. Uh So what is the role of urban form, materials and composition
? In the urban energy balance. Uh So we start with this figure here and we
look at the key drivers of the energy balance, which are the sources of
energy input into the urban setting. It starts with short wave radiation
from the sun. That's the key driver of, of the uh urban energy balance.
But there's also a source of energy that's input by our own activities,
waste heat from buildings, uh industry and vehicles. So how this energy
that enters the environment and uh is sort of moved around um in in the
city depends on a number of factors related to urban form and materials.
So there's convection, there's long wave radiation emission from surfaces
, there's thermal storage as a function of the material density and and
the heat capacity of the materials in the city. And then there's
evaporation that takes some of the, the heat that's in the city and moves
it into evaporative cooling. So how do we uh mitigate urban heat in the
city? Well, there are a number of, of opportunities here in terms of how
we address some of the key drivers. So for example, at the local scale, we
can think about shading of of solar radiation in terms of the radiation
from the sun hitting surfaces, uh we can make those surfaces more
reflective to that radiation, that would be something we would refer to as
high albedo surfaces. And then furthermore, uh the the form of the city
itself. And the the depth of these urban canyons actually affects
radiation trapping. Uh So the sun coming in during the day, uh more of
that solar energy is stored in the building materials. And at night as
you're trying to cool the city through long wave evaporative or long wave
emissions, um that trapping actually makes it harder for surfaces to cool.
So that's an element of urban form. That's important Vapo transpiration.
Obviously, the more vegetation you have, the more pervious materials you
have in the city, the better able you are to to use moisture as an
evaporative cooler for the city. And then of course, how you design the,
the mi the city in terms of the materials affects thermal storage.
So with that as sort of a an overview of some of the key issues related to
how urban form materials and composition affect the uh climate and what we
can do about it. You know, the next set of questions really have to do
with, with which which strategies do we choose and how do we deploy them?
So I would say that before we, we go that far, we need to step back and
ask ourselves, well, what is it that we're really trying to solve? And
oftentimes cities will glo glom onto this concept of, well, we want to
reduce the urban heat island and I would say you don't really want to
reduce the urban heat island per se. What you really want to do is you
want to think about your underlying goals, which very co very commonly are
, we want to improve health and well being for our citizens. We want to
reduce heat related mortality. And so if your focus is questions like that
, you'll be thinking beyond temperature differences between city and, and
suburbs, you'll be thinking about humidity, you'll be thinking about
mixing uh and all sorts of, of other climate parameters in the city. So
now why is research needed? Why do we need to come together with the city
? Because uh you've got great questions. We've got great questions, but we
need our, our questions to address what your concerns are. And you have to
recognize that uh there are a lot of complications and nuances related to
implementing strategies. So there are co benefits of any strategy you
might consider and there are also potential unintended adverse
consequences. So we need to understand those aspects of heat mitigation.
We also have to understand that any heat mitigation strategy you implement
affects multiple climate variables and it affects these variables across
space and across time. So you have different effects at night than in the
daytime and winter and summer. And then furthermore, it's not just a
matter of deploying heat mitigation strategies. Let's plant, am uh you
know, a million trees or whatnot. It's the spatial distribution of these
trees. It's a spatial distribution of surfaces that you modify that, that
also play a role in affecting the urban thermal signature. So with that as
sort of an overview of the topic area, I wanna jump quickly into my own
research and how it relates to some of Phoenix's needs related to uh heat
mitigation. So I've worked in a number of cities most recently, my current
projects kind of focus on Los Angeles, Houston and Phoenix. And so I've
grouped them into sort of two categories of projects I'm working on. One
is targeted heat mitigation. So the goal in this suite of projects really
is to reduce vulnerability to extreme heat, but through strategic
allocation of resources, so that the word targeted is very important here.
So when we think of v vulnerability, we think of the populations that are
sensitive, we think of those that don't have the adaptive capacity to
respond and we think about exposure, those are the three key pillars of
vulnerability. And so we can overlay. This is a study that we did for Los
Angeles, but it's obviously very uh translatable to Phoenix. Uh We overlay
where the elderly are, where the poor are and where there's extreme
exposure and extreme exposure for L A can actually be inland where it's
very hot or it can also be closer to the coast where it's not as hot but
there's less uh availability of air conditioning. So in that project, we
recognize the importance of of understanding heat mitigation across scale.
So it's not all about very local scales. It's not all about very large
scales. We need to sort of integrate uh our understanding of effects. So
from the county to regional scales where we can explore the impact uh sort
of the area impact of specific modifications that we might propose at the
neighborhood scale to explore local microclimate effects of specific case
studies. So what can we do to cool a particular neighborhood? But then
also recognizing that it's not all about the outdoor environment. So we
need to kind of go to the building scale to explore the effects of heat
mitigation strategies uh at the local scale in terms of indoor thermal
comfort and air conditioning, energy use. And what happens if say your air
conditioner goes out. So that project has some overlaps with this home air
project that we're doing in Houston right now. The goal of this project is
really to understand how construction management practices and occupant
behavior interact and influence indoor air quality and thermal
environments uh during air quality episodes and extreme heat events. But
with an emphasis on understanding, well, what happens when you have uh a
heat wave that's coincident with a power failure which actually has
happened fairly recently. Um And so we refer to that as a heat disaster.
And so that's, that's one of the the key areas that we're looking at and
the methods in this study is a case study of field measurements in 20
assisted living facilities in Houston. And yes, during Harvey, we were
actively monitoring me making measurements. In fact, those sensors are
gonna be coming home in about two weeks and we're going to be doing some
analysis of that. Uh We're using those that field study along with surveys
, surveys that we're actually replicating in Los Angeles and Phoenix uh
modeling work at the building scale to the to the neighborhood and
regional scales and laboratory measurements. So this is just, I'm gonna
give you a flavor of, of two of the research questions that we've been
addressing to understand the kinds of findings we're getting. So the first
question is how hot and polluted does it get indoors during a heat
disaster? So a heat wave with air conditioning failure and while it might
be difficult to see this, this plot in detail, the upshot is that during a
power outage, the indoor temperatures can easily rise well above ambient
outdoor temperatures. So that's this blue line. So shortly after that
power failure relative to the green line, which is the actual outdoor
ambient temperature. Um and also the indoor air quality. In this case,
we're just looking indoor ozone, uh which is typically much lower than
outdoor ozone, of course, but it can rise rapidly depending upon the
occupant behavior and the behavioral response to the episode. So there's
some interesting interplay between indoor air quality and sort of thermal
resilience um related to that we're asking a question of how do energy
efficiency measures affect the ability of a building to maintain a healthy
indoor thermal condition. Something we refer to as passive survivability
when we're thinking about what happens if you don't have ac how quickly
does the house heat up? And so the, the two upshots from this are that yes
, you can deploy a wide range of energy efficiency strategies from high al
beta roofs to better insulation in the walls or, or ceilings to window
retrofits and all this and the the effect on energy savings is there. But
anything you do to the building is going to also affect its passive
survivability. And so one thing that we've identified here is that for
example, in existing older construction buildings, uh adding a high
Alberta roof actually can reduce the number of hours outside this passive
survivability metric by on the order of 25%. So you can have huge effects
on passive survivability. So with that, I'll conclude, it hopefully gives
you a flavor of the types of things that I'm doing and hopefully it is
also a little bit of an intro introduction to this session. Thanks,
thanks David. So next up, we have Billy Turner, Billy's with the school
Geographical Sciences and urban planning and the school sustainability.
Uh So very quickly, I'm one of a group of people working out of this
particular lab that are very much interested on the uh distribution that
is a patterning in the shape of land covers from the household level up to
neighborhoods in regard to how uh this would affect uh uh temperature,
both land surface temperature and a above ground temperature. And I call
this land architecture or land system architecture, meaning that there is
a design to the horizontal uh shaping of different land covers, the
composition and configuration of land covers and which configuration
involves pattern, connectivity and shape uh of, of the land covers. And we
, as I said, we have any number of people uh who are working on this
particular activity. And I just want to show you a few uh all the results
that I'm going to give you uh our results that I would argue are in first
stage analysis, meaning yes, they've been published. But I would still
argue, you know, there's two or three more steps to go before we move
forward. And I'm sorry, I never know how to, there we go. All right. And
um the other point I want to make out is we have not include any
verticality in these studies. And the reason for that is that we haven't
had lidar data until now. And so now we'll start adding verticality into
this into this notion of what is the configuration of the land system. I
want to show you four results. The first three results are from studies uh
examining uh excuse me. The first three results are studies using frag
stats. These are distributional uh measures that come out of ecology to
say different land covers have different patterns, different shapes and
whatnot. The bottom one is a a new metric used in the spatial sciences
called uh normal momentum of inertia. And it's not important as to, to
what that means. Uh And so let me go very quickly through them. So these
are, as I said, are all sort of initial stage studies, they're all done at
the parcel level, right? So they begin with 1 m square land covers of
individual parcels and build up to uh neighborhoods. So in the first, this
is looking at above ground temperature, OK, not land surface temperature.
And all I'm gonna give you are the most robust results from the studies,
not the multiple uh parts of the study. So the big message in our first
analysis of above ground temperature is that the complexity that is the
shape of the residential unit turns out to be quite robust uh in terms of
temperature reducing temperature, especially at night time. And we find
this difficult to explain. Uh we're still in the stage of trying to
address why would this happen? We need liar data. We think before we can
really begin to answer that question in regard to the issue of shading and
whatnot. And number two, what you see. And now this is on land surface
temperature done around the entire valley that the more you have small
patches of different land covers tightly connected with one another.
That's what I'm trying to show you all uh in, in the picture, right? The
more you get uh an increase. Uh I believe I can't read this from here
increase in daytime temperature
number three and here we're getting into shape uh as you move from, uh
let's say, more compact kind of shapes in certain land covers to complex
shapes of land covers. Now remember this from individual households up to
neighborhoods. Uh what are the results? And you can see that we do get uh
differences uh as the shapes increase in complexity. And that's what I'm
trying to show you in the, in the, in the picture, uh you get uh increased
or decreased uh temperatures. Uh and I can't read it, sorry. Uh But you
can read exactly what it says. It happens in the last um um in the last
study and number four, using a normal mo momentum of inertia, which comes
from spatial analytics. Basically, what this is telling us is that as the
shapes become more compact and densely associated with each other, the
greater cooling effect or the grating heating effect that you get from the
different land covers. Now, when I say land cover, I'm talking grass
versus trees versus uh impervious surface versus buildings versus right,
the whole array of different land covers uh that are out there, we're
beginning to find if you would uh some very interesting uh results that in
fact, something more than composition is involved. Now, very quickly, can
we do that? Can we do something to optimize this? To tell us something
about Phoenix? Here we are, I should point out this is central Phoenix, uh
south central Phoenix. And what we've done is create an optimization model.
Those little squares that you see are 100 and 80 square, uh uh 100 and 80
100 and 80 m across. And what they show you, if you had that many spaces
to green, it shows you the degree of greening you would get during the day
and the de the de degree of greening you would get uh not the degree of
temperature that you would get during the day versus uh during the night.
And you can see the very significant ones you get uh during the day and
you would say, OK, but we, we can't change those at night. So we do an
analysis of the optimization. And in fact, if you could do this patterning
, according to our model, you would get 96% of the daytime cooling as well
as 96 96% of the nighttime cooling. So these are just some of the kinds of
ways we're trying to deal with the uh land architecture of the city and
how it affects temperature.
What?
No, you could place them.
You would get that kind of impact according to our initial models.
OK. Thanks. Thanks Billy. So next up. We have Chris Homa Haney. Thank you.
Sorry, Haney. Sorry, thanks. All right, thanks.
Uh, hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Um I'm gonna talk about, um,
parking infrastructure in Maricopa County. Uh This project has only
recently started so I don't have some results related to necessarily heat
, but I have some potential strategies or potential ideas that we can move
forward. So, um why and how I'm gonna get into that really quick? Um Why
basically parking is uh a strong influence on urban form and vice versa.
So there's a very, there's a lot of interest in kind of quantifying how
many parking spaces there are in the region to, to see how that influences
urban form, which ultimately influences heat. And there's also extremely
limited knowledge on the amount of parking we have not just in Maricopa
County, but all around there is usually very few studies that look at kind
of where parking is, how much parking there is and why it is there. And
then finally, once we have uh a quantification of how much there is, we'll
be able to look at some potential heat mitigation strategies. Um So how
we're doing this um looking at basically taking um the assessor's database
, um parcel data and then um property use codes and then cross referencing
that with parking codes by the different municipalities. So for example,
um commercial building in Phoenix might have a different requirement of
parking spaces in a commercial building in Tempe. Um, you know, there
might be a requirement of one space for 300 square feet of, um, floor
space or, or et cetera. And then by combining these, we'll be able to
estimate off street parking. And then next, we'll also want to look at, uh
, on street parking. So I'm just gonna show some of the quick preliminary
results. This doesn't have to do with heat per se. This is just
quantification of where parking is in. Um, Maricopa County. This is the
zoomed in um, kind of urban area. And so you can see we're kind of right
there in the middle and a lot, not surprisingly, uh, the highest density
of parking is in downtown Phoenix. But you also see, um, some kind of
patches that are kind of higher density, um, all around the region and
those are usually, um, you know, parking or, um, high density parking, um
, commercial malls and, um, mixed use areas. And then, uh, a lot of the
parking also kind of the density of parking also follows some of the
highways. Um, so, you know, easy access for people getting right off the
highway to access, uh, all different types of commercial areas. And so
basically, the next steps for this analysis is once we've, um, quantified
on street parking, we'll be able to combine off street on street parking,
look at the distribution of parking in the region and then inspect, um,
kind of where um how parking might relate to high quality transit. Um So
we're interested in that because uh thermal environment might increase um
due to different kinds of pavements. And, um you know, when we're
concerned about heat exposure and people's thermal comfort, um we wanna
make sure that that's lower in, in transit areas preferably. And then also
look at uh the historical analysis of parking trends, this is related to
urban form and see how urban form relates to the development of parking in
the region and also how parking might influence urban form. And then
finally, we'll be able to look at mitigation strategies um such as cool
pavements, increasing albedo um and possibly even changing parking
requirements in the region. And that's, that's all I have. So.
Ok, so hopefully I get this last name right. So next up, we have Jeff
Stenar Club. Sorry. All right, go ahead. Alright. Thank you, Ray again. My
name is Jeff Stemper. I'm a senior engineer with uh N CE and also uh a
faculty member that supports the School of Sustainability and at Su and
the National Center of Excellence for Smart Innovations, our lab at the,
at the university. So I'm gonna talk to you about pavements and the urban
heat island effect. And this is a really good uh Chris really led into
this nicely because you'll see how selection of materials on projects
around the city or urban areas can actually impact uh what effects you see
in terms of urban Heat island,
I guess you can just start out with questions is, you know, you're looking
at this from a big perspective is how do you evaluate it? How do you even
start to evaluate uh what are the driving factors? Uh You look at the
engineering properties and materials in the sciences? Uh do the physical
and thermal properties and materials even matter or should we just uh look
for white surfaces everywhere? Uh There's many different questions. Uh You
guys will have these slides so you can look at them and potentially this
will generate some discussion for after the presentation here. And then
what tools and models are out there? How can we do this some ways to, I
just want to present a few ways of how we would even evaluate these is one
of the big ones you'll probably see everywhere is the the aster the mal
imaging. This is satellite imaging. I'll show you pictures in the next
slide. Another example is what was done. What we did before was mobile uh
measurements around the city of Phoenix with a truck with equipment on it.
Uh We have laboratory testing capabilities to actually measure the
properties of materials. Uh The other images uh on the top right is an
image in downtown Chicago with a thermal imaging camera. Uh One of the
researchers actually did a study rode around in a police helicopter and
took these images. But you can see the the yellow, the hot areas, the
pavement surfaces, the some portions of the building. And another way is
to actually embed sensors and pavements where we can take measurements of
the temperatures.
So when you start looking at here, these pictures really started this
initiative in terms of the impacts of pavements is if you look on the left
image, this is uh during the daytime, the images and you see the yellow is
the hottest color. The hottest areas around the city are the the rock
formation, South Mountain camel back the airport downtown. But then what
really brought this into light is look at the nighttime temperature, ok?
You look at the night time and you still see areas that uh I guess what,
what's the biggest areas you see here that are still red. This is at 11
o'clock at night as you see again, camel back area the airport, but you
start to see the city streets uh light up. So you see that pavements do
have an impact on uh retaining that heat at night time.
There's a lot of news media coverage out there about painting surfaces
white and this does have valid imp impacts, especially in terms of looking
at rooftops on buildings. However, when you start to look at pavements is
we're physically on these surfaces, we're not on the rooftops necessarily.
So now we have an effect of uh reflective surfaces, uh human factors that
come into play in selection of these material properties. So the big
takeaway here is that when you're looking at pavement materials, it's not
just a black and white answer is there's many factors to be considered and
also the application of those pavements and materials uh play a big role
in that.
Here's a, here's a, I'm gonna give you guys a couple of examples is this
is the highway 101. If you look in the lower box, uh actually I'm gonna
start with the upper box as you see that there's not a lot of red showing
up in that area. Ok. What, what? So again, and then you look in the lower
box and you see there is a lot of red. So what's the difference here? Ok.
Same pavement surface is the upper box is what you notice in this picture
is this is some of the open areas, ok? There's open land to the, to the
right of the image and to the left. So you have uh more wind moving
through that pavement surface can cool faster. Uh the pavement in the
south or the lower box is actually uh some of the areas is the depressed
interstate. So there's uh concrete walls that depress that pavement where
we go under overpasses or that's what's required. You could see the
impacts of it's not just the pavement surface, it's the same concrete
surface.
Ok. Now you saw actually back in that other images, you're looking at a
white concrete pavement. Now you look at this image and you say, OK, now
this is surface with asphalt. It was the uh open graded friction courses
or the, the quiet pavement technology that's around the valley. And this
kind of contradicts what I just said is you have a black surface, you
would expect it to be hotter and you have AAA Canyon effect where it's a
depressed freeway. So now if you look at the images that it's actually uh
less red than to the north, which is around Metro Center, right? So now
it's, you're contradicting what we just said in terms of the color of the
pavement, the type of materials, we think that asphalt pavements absorb a
lot of uh uh heat because they're black and in some cases, they do in some
cases they don't.
OK. In terms of the la la laboratory evaluations in our, our laboratory is
we've uh pioneered some testing procedures uh different ways to test
materials and see how they retain heat, how they release heat. Uh At the
university. We also have full scale test sections that were constructed of
different materials that have been used by a su by uh Princeton, by the US
Army to study the effects of different uh uh say moisture, different
things on heat released from pavements.
And uh one thing I guess to take away on two on this side is that you'll
see a lot of students is that we do all have an obligation uh as, as
practitioners, as researchers to instill this uh this uh idea into the
next generation of, of students and uh people working in this industry and
you'll see students involved. Uh Here's an example of the test sections.
We had artificial turf, asphalt concrete, uh Portland, cement concrete,
and we even had gravel that you see around the buildings around Phoenix
and looked at measured the temperatures. So that was just a brief
introduction of uh how materials can impact this decision and, and some
contact information. So, thank you.
All right now. So we're gonna take 10 minutes um to discuss among you,
what you think the th these at these things that you've learned today
could be applied to the, to the projects or to the work that you do. And
if you, you really have some important question, you can go ahead and ask
that too, but we're focused on discussion. And what we'd like to do is
Jennifer has a microphone, we're gonna try to pass it around. But if
Jennifer's on that side of the room and you're on this side of the room
and you really need to go, just go ahead and make your question and I'll
repeat it into the mic. So who's first? We have it right back here? No, no.
Oh, we gave careful. So if you want to contribute to the discussion now,
you know, I know some of you and so not all of you, but I know some of you
and if I know you and we don't get any questions, I'm gonna start picking
on you. So, so you, you need to get your neighbor to ask questions. So
with questions, comments, mostly comments.
OK? Thanks Martin.
Just going back to this. I mean, it looked like on um, certainly um Billy
Turner's research around where we can, where we should put our, we want to
actually make everyone within a five minute walk of a park or open space.
And so if we could actually pick where should those park, if there's a
good overlap between where we could do that and where it would actually
make accessible. So places there aren't parks currently but where we could
put a park and it would also help in cooling, I think uh looking at that.
So just understanding better your the conclusion of your research, uh if
you could just speak to that about where if we actually can map where we
need to put uh spaces, cooling spaces in order to cool the city as a whole.
Well, I guess the lesson was, go ahead, go ahead. We can hear you. Go
ahead.
Yeah, he, he's loud though. So there we are. So the lesson. Can you hear
that the lesson would be that, that it does matter in, in, in, in that one
study. I show you it does matter where you put them and So you are going
to get more robust or less robust results, apropos the cooling that you
want depending upon the patterning and the number right that you use. If
you say I'm only gonna put them where we have access to parks, you know,
I'm gonna green the parks and understand these have to be greened, they
can't be dead grass, that's not gonna give you the results. But if you had
greening um And you, and you said, OK, what is the biggest bang for the
buck? We have the optimization models that would provide given the number
of parks that you have and where you could place them, which ones would
give you for a particular area of town? Uh the biggest bang for the buck.
So, oh we have, go ahead.
So maybe this is even a question for Chuck, you guys and you'll probably
do this, you're all doing separate projects. One of the challenges we have
as I'm with Vital Health Foundation trying to work with uh A SU is you're
all doing separate projects, you're not working with each other. So is
there some as you're working on this, is there some kind of networking
among the researchers? Uh because part of the problem is trying to even
sort out everything that's going on at A SU. And our sense is you're not
collaborating with each other, Suzanne. Uh you should have introduced the
morning session then I mean, this is, this is an issue. This is an issue
for us among our a su for sure. Uh And it has to be mystifying to someone
outside a su as well as frustrating. Uh That's what we're here all about.
Um Melissa Daro, who you'll hear later about. This is her dissertation is
how can we build a platform for better collaboration and intergroup
knowledge? So this is what we're about
David
and, and we've, there's a new center that David Saylor is the director of
for Urban Climate Research. Uh And we, we're going to place our data
sources and the links to the things that happened this morning on that
site as a partial encouragement among us and among you to have a go to
point, can I ask a question? I know I'm not from Phoenix, Jeff. I was
around 10 years ago. We poured a permeable pavement parking lot at the Art
Center at a su and I thought it was great and why aren't all of our
parking lots permeable pavement? Why aren't all of our new freeways this
asphalt that's cooler and quieter where wherever you are there, you are.
That's a great question. And actually the parking lot at the Art Center,
uh our team just took a look at it and it, there's a lot of concern that
these Permal pavements don't survive and it's actually looks in great
shape. If you do look at it, one of the areas that doesn't look in good
shape was actually a construction defect. So we'll blame it on that. But
that is a great question of, of why uh the other complicating factor is
that there's challenges with pavements after they're constructed is that
they change colors, they deteriorate, they fill in with debris. And so
there's still a lot of unknown there. But that's a good question is that
there should be more permeable parking lots pavements, but there, there's
an application for them. You can't just blanket statements say that we
should put permeable pavements everywhere because what our research has
shown is they're extremely hot during the day, but they cool off a lot at
night time, they cool off quicker. So those morning temperatures that you
talked about in your introduction statement is cooler in the morning,
they're releasing that heat a lot quicker than traditional pavements. So
that question, I think, uh oh,
so potentially uh hubs could be a proverbial fly in the ointment because
they can fill in the pores. A re there m current methods to think about
how to minimise the effect if, if we're talking, if we're extending the
discussion on permeable surfaces.
Ok. Yeah, there are, there are ways, uh they can fill in, they can also be
washed out. There's methods to, they have, there's ways to clean them out.
Uh Perme pavements have been used traditionally for stormwater mitigation.
There's a benefit there and that's where the fill in starts to cause
issues is you, you, you slow the storm water mitigation, but in terms of
heat uh dispersion, uh that's not, I don't, we don't have too much
background on that, but it is effective. We know that.
OK. So I had, I had a question or a comment suggestion over here. So I was
actually kind of fascinated by the one presentation and like in all of
them, in the sense that because there's a lot of interconnection between
all of them, but specifically, the one I forget which John, I think it was
the second presentation where they were talking about the different forms
of building types, right? The density between them, the irregular shapes,
the and the impacts it had between the land surface temperature at night
time and during the daytime and all that kind of good stuff because the
city um in uh just east of downtown is currently working on the potential
of redeveloping um a significant portion of the neighborhood. And when I
kinda think about sort of and, you know, and it is an area which based
upon past research is a heat island area for the city. Um And sort of like
it, it in a way it sort of like draws in upon all of the research that all
of um you all are doing of, you know, we have of course, a challenge of,
you know, there's a certain number of new units that need to be built and
all that kind of stuff, there's green space considerations that need to be
put in here. Um and there'll be new roads and new streets um as well as in
terms of sort of the building typologies um that will be utilized and sort
of how are those actually arranged or designed or set up? Um sort of based
upon the research that's been happening. Well, well, well, if you sort of
stagger the buildings, like, you know, you are able to mitigate heat a
little bit more. Um uh Not that I, and, and in some ways, I kind of feel
like I wish there were answers were there already because, you know, we're
kind of, you know, time is not on our side to help, make, help inform
these kinds of decisions. But, um but yeah, so I was just kind of, you
know, that this is clearly an area where you have an opportunity for large
scale redevelopment in an urban setting, right? Versus sort of looking at
how you could do new development, you know, on the outskirts of town, um
to really have an impact upon sort of the heat, urban heat issue in
Phoenix. So that, that's a good point. So how many of you in the room are
currently involved in the design or a building? Uh a construction of a
building or a parking lot or a green space area? Go ahead, raise your hand
, but there's you and keep it up, keep it up keep your hands up and how
many of you were involved in the management and maintenance of a scape or
building or Parker area? Ok. So that, that's a very large percentage of
you in the room. So there are a number of you in the room who these
concepts would be applicable to in terms of the daily work that you do. Ok.
So we're gonna, we're gonna move on topic and we're gonna shift a little
bit away from buildings and temperatures and we're gonna move to uh
thermal comfort and health where we're focused more on people and less on
buildings. And to start us off is gonna be Ariana Middle who is uh with
the school, geographical Sciences. Um I mean, the Department of Geography
and Urban Studies at Temple University. OK. So Temple University, that's
not a su all of you are saying, wait a minute, I thought this was a su
Ariana is a su she, she's been with us for a number of years and continues
to work with us as we go forward. So Ariana, go ahead. Thanks Ray. Um Yeah
, so um I joined a SU in 2009 as a postdoc actually with the decision
center for Desert City and I just recently six weeks ago joined Temple um
university. Um but I'm still here. So my research is at the intersection
of the um previous uh session uh which dealt with urban form and the
upcoming session uh which is uh about thermal comfort. So I'm specifically
interested in how you can use urban form to improve thermal comfort. So
how can you use the arrangement of buildings and, and types of trees and
things to improve comfort um in the city? So just as a quick recap, so
we've heard about urban form before and we had a really great summary of
urban form by um I excuse me, I don't know your name. Um Yeah, so, so when
I uh speak about urban form, I mean, the physical characteristics of a
city. So that includes uh how you arrange buildings, what type of
buildings you use, the the height of the buildings, the materials, if it's
a steel construction or, or a glass building, um how you space out those
buildings, how, how wide your roads are, how many lanes they have. Um how
many trees you plant, what type of trees, how you arrange those trees if
you use state shade structures. So all of these things um define urban
form and we, as we design cities um build this urban forum and the way we
build this uh that actually impacts urban climate, all kinds of variables.
We heard about air temperature, surface temperature, the amount of
radiation that that comes into the city, all these things. So it's
basically the way we build cities impacts um the local climate in those
cities. I mean, I would like to give you a very specific urban form
example. Um that's trees. Um The city of Phoenix has a major uh policy, a
document that specifically addresses heat in the city. And that's the um
tree and shade master plan um which sets a goal for a 25% tree canopy
cover in the city of Phoenix by 2030. Um and I conducted a uh assessment
of uh of this goal uh two years ago with a group of people and we used a
microclimate model and we uh we designed a residential neighborhood. We
virtually planted 25% trees in this neighborhood. And we found that in the
afternoon, this leads to a 3.5 °F cooling in this neighborhood. So now
these results should not be scaled up to the whole city. They only refer
to this particular residential neighborhood. But uh imagine now it's um
100 and 17 degrees in the city. OK. So we get three degrees cooling. It's
100 and 14. Does it make it comfortable? I don't know, I don't think 100
and 14 °F sounds very comfortable. And that's actually a specific goal in
the plan that says uh we envision residential neighborhoods that a re tree
growth, that a re cool and comfortable. Yet when I'm under a tree, I feel
much better than if I'm out in the sun. So um this means that if you only
look at air temperature, you're missing parts of the story. Uh when you're
talking about how people feel in the city. Um, so let's do a quick survey.
So, uh we have 75.6
°F in this room right now. This is a nine point scale one is very cold.
Nine is very hot. I assume nobody is very cold or very hot. So maybe let's
start with category number three, which is cool. So, raise your hand. Is
anybody cool right now? Wow, that's a lot of people um who feels uh
slightly cool.
Oh, that's a lot of people too uh neutral, who's I I would be neutral
right now. Okay. Um Who feels slightly warm?
One person?
So anybody warm or hot? Probably not. Um So you see we're all exposed to
the same air temperature which is 75 °F. Yet uh people feel different. Um
And that's why um there is a, there is a definition for thermal comfort
that's in the Ashray standard. It says that thermal comfort is the
condition of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment
and, and the most important piece here, it's a subjective evaluation. So
it will be different for each and every person. Um There are a couple of
variables that um make up your thermal comfort. Some of them you can
measure these a re the environmental factors such as air temperature, um
mean rate and temperature. I'll get to this in a second. What that is uh
wind speed. Humidity. So, so if it's monsoon season and it's very humid
out, you might feel less comfortable. Although it's the sa me temperature
than when it's dry. So, so, so humidity plays with role. Um, but then
there are personal factors and they are different for each and every
person. So there's the metabolic rate. That means how active are you, are
you riding a bike right now or are you sitting under a tree? So depending
on your activity level, you might feel more or less comfortable and uh
your clothing, uh depending on how you're dressed, might, might, might
change how comfortable you feel. And then also psychological factor. So
there a re studies that show if you actually want to be in a place AAA
particular time and um you actually feel more comfortable than if you
don't wanna be in a particular place. So all of these factors play into
how comfortable you would feel. Um And there are certain ways you can uh
measure actually how comfortable you feel. So one is you have to actually
like I just did ask people, so how comfortable are you on a scale from 1
to 1 to 9? Um And then all these um environmental factors that I talked
about, you can measure um there is this uh globe thermometer device, it
has a black Globe and this globe pretends to be a human body. It's
collecting all the radiation that that hits the body from 360 degrees. So
that includes the solar radiation from the sun, uh the heat that's emitted
from warm surfaces, all of these things. Um So this device can measure
this, it's called globe temperature and that can be translated into mean
radiant temperature. And that's basically the sum of all the surface
temperatures that a re surrounding you. And then there is the uh mean
radiant temperature cart that I built. Um that's a little bit more
sophisticated and, and it, it measures all the radiation components in all
directions and gives you an integrated value for the mean rate and
temperature. Um So these a re ways to measure thermal comfort or mean RN
temperature. And we conducted a study um a t the uh mu um two years ago uh
where we uh measured thermal comfort with this um device. And we conducted
surveys and we asked people, so how comfortable do you feel on a scale
from 1 to 9? And we found that people who were under the shade structure
or who were under trees felt one point more comfortable on the nine point
scale that I showed you previously. Um So that means that um shade
improves your thermal comfort by one point and out of all the variables
that we measured air temperature, surface temperature, wind speed,
humidity. The radiation component was the biggest driver of thermal
comfort. So that means that shade is really the variable that determines
if you're comfortable or not even more than air temperature. And that
really highlights the importance of shade in the city. Um So I have been
uh pulling around this cart that I built um across various areas and here
are just some examples for research questions that I'm addressing with
this car. Um So I'm investigating for one, what, what uh what combination
is best um in terms of uh surface type and shade cover. So is it better to
have a tree over grass? Is it better to have a tree over concrete? Is it
better to have sun exposed grass? So all of these different variations,
I'm measuring with the card to see how this impacts the the measurable
thermal comfort. Um I'm also um investigating different shade types. Um So
that's the 50 grades of shade study. Um So I I have uh measured shade
sails umbrellas, uh shade from buildings, shade from uh shade from
different trees. Um And so the the the analysis is currently ongoing, but
um the goal is to find out which shade type is the most effective to keep
people cool and comfortable. Um We're also uh pulling the cart through
parks to see which type of trees a re most efficient for shading and, and
which arrangement of trees is the most efficient is most efficient for,
for thermal comfort. And then um uh we did this in Tempe downtown and that
goes back to your question, actually trying to investigate how the
arrangement of buildings and the type of buildings and and the width of
the street, how this impacts thermal comfort. And then finally, we'll hear
about this in a little while. Um Julia has used the card to investigate
how people are exposed to the heat and how comfortable they are while
they're walking to, to a bus stop actually. Um So all of this data will
eventually lead uh to a thermal comfort model. So, so I'm uh collecting
Google street view data. You can use the data to project uh project um the
images onto fish eye photos. They can be used to calculate radiation.
That's the sa me that the card would measure. But you can calculate this
from the photo and then you can calculate mean rate and temperature or
thermal comfort uh city wide for any street that has uh Google street view
images. And then one application that's my last slide um that you could
envision is um this is actually a, a fine scale thermal comfort map.
Imagine you're AAA T the brickyard at the uh at the on the A SU campus.
And you would like to go to the MU and grab something to eat. Um You could
take the shortest path uh which can be calculated between those two points.
But you could also use the thermal comfort or the mean rate and
temperature as a waiting factor and provide the user with a path that's
slightly longer. But it's more comfortable and more shaded. Um And this
could be used also to for exa mples, assess comfort in neighbourhoods and
see maybe one neighbourhood is more comfortable overall, maybe that's more
attractive for businesses. So um yeah, so this is some, some exa mples of
uses of this model and that's it. Thank you so much.
Six.
So let me introduce David Houla who's also with the School of Geographical
Sciences, Urban Planning. They, they like our dominating. You guys are
kind of dominating. We get some more departments in here. David. Go ahead.
Thank you, Ray and thank you all for being here. Uh It's a pleasure to
spend a few moments, introducing the human health side of the story as
well and to share a little bit of our research uh related to comfort and
health.
Uh human health is certainly affected by heat and by heat in the city, we
heard a lot about thermal comfort. Fortunately, we didn't see anybody who
is experiencing hot or very hot conditions, but people in the city do
experience hot and very hot conditions every summer. And for some of those
folks, there are adverse health outcomes that occur. This is a diagram
that the uh US Centers for Disease Control and prevention has put together
that suggests a pyramid of health impacts. We were just thinking at the
base of the pyramid. Thermal discomfort occurs to many of our uh residents
and visitors. There are more serious and acute outcomes that affected an
increasingly narrower and narrower portion of the population. And here in
the Phoenix metro area, we're quite fortunate to have a lot of data about
different parts of this pyramid in surveys conducted by the County Health
Department and a su for example, we know that something like one third of
people will experience some form of heat discomfort. Uh during an average
summer, the state health Department has information about how many
emergency department visits and hospitalizations we see related to heat.
And most unfortunately, we have a, a number of deaths that occur related
to heat in Maricopa County uh every year. Uh according to the Maricopa
County Department of Health in 2015, uh there were nearly four dozen
deaths and we'll talk more about the mortality statistics. Uh in a few
slides. I think it's quite important when we're thinking about our various
heat mitigation response strategies to think about where in this pyramid
uh we're targeting as we try to evaluate success. If we're gonna plant
more trees in a park? Are we trying to reduce heat related mortality? Are
we trying to improve thermal comfort? What are the right evaluation
metrics as we continue to deploy uh more and more uh projects and we are
really well positioned to think about these issues. I just wanted to
highlight the, the excellent collaborations and research that have
happened in the past our County Health Department and our State Health
department are leading the national conversations about heat and health.
There are working groups, for example, nationally, uh trying to
understand more specifically who's impacted by heat, which diagnosis codes
that are used in the medical examiner's office could be related to heat.
Those national working, the chairs of those national working groups are
from our county health department, from our state health department and A
SU has played a role here as well. I know you can't see the figures at the
bottom of the slides. Uh They simply suggest that we, we know a fair bit
about the geography of heat impacts in our city. What are the
neighborhoods where rates of heat related mortality or morbidity are
higher? Uh What are the threshold temperatures above which we see uh the
most uh serious health outcomes occur? But we don't know everything and,
and this is my call to call to action and call for collaboration. Uh We
held a meeting in partnership with the National Weather Service and State
Health Department uh earlier this year. And one of the questions we asked
related to heat preparedness and response was how would a community know
it has successfully coped with extreme heat? And overwhelmingly the answer
from the 50 some participants at this meeting was that the community would
know at the end of the season that they had successfully coped if the heat
, number of heat deaths had gone down, that was seen as one of the the
best possible evaluation metrics. And I'm, I'm sorry to say that that has
not been the way the statistics have played out over the recent decade. Uh
In this county, you can see the annual number of heat related deaths uh on
the bottom 2016 on the far right hand side of the slide, as you see it, I
believe, uh 2016 unfortunately had the record number of heat related
deaths that the County Health Department has ever recorded in the 10 years.
Uh 11 years of running their advanced surveillance PP uh advanced
surveillance program. And this is even true after accounting for
population growth and other factors that might have affected the health
status of the population. Uh even more concerning and this is some work
that Hannah Putnam wave your hand. Hannah is, is leading with our team at
A SU is that we don't think the weather in 2016 was so much worse than the
other years over the past decade. These lines show what our model suggests.
The number of heat related deaths should have been based on the weather.
We're putting a lot of energy into thinking about heat and health uh in
our region. 2016 should not have set the record for the number of heat
related deaths uh based on the weather alone. So something else is
happening and I think that something else is, is what we can collectively
as a group continue uh to think about uh this is a conceptual diagram that
some of my colleagues and I put together recently to think about what the
relationship might be between climate drivers and adverse health outcomes.
And I think many of the folks in this room can identify where they fit in.
In this diagram, we've talked a lot about the built environment and
infrastructure thus far, uh public health systems conventions, we imagine
to be a very, very broad uh and and nebulous box. And it's actually in
that box that we think the causal drivers behind the increase in 2016
might occur. Uh We know that there was an incredible number. Uh There was
an incredible increase in the number of unsheltered homeless people in
Maricopa County between 2015 and 2016. I'm very supportive of all the
strategies we've discussed related to heat mitigation. But if we're not
thinking about the number of, of beds available in homeless shelters, if
we're not thinking about our energy assistance programs, we might be
missing a really important part of the story in understanding how these
adverse uh events come to be. Uh very briefly, if I May Ray just wanted to
highlight one project we're working on uh as a team at a SU. This is a
National Science Foundation study called uh three Heat and a number of the
three heat teammates are here in the room. Uh Mary and Liza Hannah has
helped, there's Matt O over there as Well, we've surveyed 100 and 60 some
people in four different parts of the city to understand their experiences
and risks associated with heat, understanding how they cope with heat with
the power on, uh, and the power off, uh, counterintuitive result that I'm
happy to talk about with you more. Uh, across the bottom axis. Here we see
income across the vertical axis. We see the indoor temperatures we
measured in people's homes.
We don't see the relationship that we would have expected. We thought we'd
find warm indoor homes in low income neighborhoods and cooler uh indoor
areas in higher income neighborhoods. And that did not appear to be the
case uh in our sample. But we do see some other interesting patterns there.
We've also thought a little bit about emergency preparedness strategies
and how people uh might cope with these events. Water uh unsurprisingly is
an important role. Uh looking forward to more discussion. Ray is giving me
the Harry eyeball here. Uh But uh I uh I I hope uh I hope you recognize
the urgency of the the health part of the story here as we think about uh
making a cooler and more comfortable and safer city. Thanks very much.
So, let me introduce Abigail York. Um Abigail is with the school, I mean,
she's with the school of human evolution and social change. Thanks. I I
almost said school, I mean, I'm I'm so school Duke ever. I'm so ingrained
in that. Thanks.
Hi. So I'm here talking about um our work with the, the Phoenix area
Social Social Survey. I'm shorter than Dave. Um And so this is an ongoing
survey. This is the fourth time we've done it. Uh It's a part of the
Central Arizona Phoenix long term ecological research site. Many of our
researchers you've already uh heard from are a part of us a part of this
large site. The Phoenix area Social Survey was a survey that we just got
the results back, I think on Tuesday. So you'll see very hot off the press.
Um Just some uh broad overview results. We surveyed 1200
re participants in Phoenix and the surrounding area. The majority of whom
are actually in the city of Phoenix though. Um We haven't, I haven't
broken out any of that data yet because I, I just got it. Um But you'll
see. Where am I? Oh OK. So here are the neighborhoods and these are um
census black groups um Actually from 2000. This is an ongoing long term um
survey. So we've retained them even though some of these areas have
changed quite dramatically. You may notice um from your own work in the
city that and so the different sizes, but these are neighborhoods based
around the census. Um This time, our strategy for the long term ecological
research site was to focus on neighborhoods that were near some areas of
ecological interest as well. As um had the sort of bread of socio
demographic diversity. And um so for some of our geographers and, and
planners, uh you'll also notice sort of new and old development which is
related to cooling heat, but as well as other sort of um social and
ecological questions of interest. So we stratified our uh sampling design
in this way in order to make sure we were getting neighborhoods that were
close enough uh within a kilometer to some of. Uh So the salt is one of
our prime ecological areas of interest as well as mountain parks. And so
you'll notice that's where most of the neighborhoods are. Um OK, so the
2017 survey, again, we just got it back. We had about a 40% response rate
which we were happy with. It was a male survey. Um We have broad lots and
lots of questions about environmental attitudes, neighborhood satisfaction
, environmental knowledge, water and landscape management. And I think
this survey is really very rich because it's asking people what they do on
their own parcels and land. And we, there aren't a lot of other secondary
data sources that we can get that. So it's sort of in important as well as
you know, how they're thinking about things um happening both in the city
and, and much um more broadly. So we do have quite a lot of questions. Um
And again, many of the researchers here were actively involved in
developing these dave in particular on the on heat. Um So their behavior
mitigation concerns some of the attitudes that they have about it. Um What
they're trying to do on site. So we have lots of questions and I, I don't
have them with me today about all of the different behaviors they're doing
on their parcel to try to deal with heat related issues. Um Maybe OK, so,
you know, we have questions about how many um have swimming pools and
other features. So this is maybe a higher income strategy for, for dealing
with heat and, and what they think it does in terms of summer temperature.
And so you can see there's quite a bit of variability there. We have
questions about lawns, we have all sorts of different kinds of uh
questions. Um We also have things so related, I think to the very last
point which I'll, it will be exciting to see how our work and the, you
know, a larger number of neighborhoods plays out with what Dave was doing
with the in person surveys. Um whether or not you were ever too hot inside
your home. And so how that relates to um income and other socio
demographic factors. So it's rich, rich data set. Um I am excited about
opportunities to collaborate with the city and I know all of our team
members are, and there's really, I would say about 30 researchers who are
actively are using this data set. And would be excited to, to work with
you. So that's just sort of a advertisement to, to get you excited. And
that's all I have because I just got the data. But thank you.
So Ya Zubin is with the school sustainability. Ya,
hi. So I'm going to tell you about uh three research projects that were
done at SU in relation to heat uh transit and thermal comfort.
Uh The first project is uh NASA develop. And the objective of this project
is to help um city of Phoenix to prioritise where to install shade
structures. A T the bus stops that a re currently unshaded. So, AC O
Research, Tea, MS analyse uh uh remote sensing imagery uh to understand uh
which uh bus stop have the highest land surface temperature.
Uh The other project uh was done in summer 2016. Uh And the goal of this
project was uh to understand what is the difference between thermal
comfort at unshaded at shaded stops. So A SU teams conducted a service at
both shaded and unshaded stops. And uh um basically, the results show that
um if we uh combine server responses, weather data and ridership, uh the
installation of 80 shade structures could increase thermal comfort of
133,000 boardings. So, uh another objective on this is to understand what
is the return of, of investment of the city that was done through uh t
2050 funding.
And uh the other project that was done this summer is uh to understand
what is the uh relation between uh design qualities and microclimate uh on
behavior and our perception of heat. So we went, uh we picked uh different
bust and light rail stops that uh have different design characteristics
and different microclimate characteristics and conducted field data
observed how people behave, uh surveyed people uh to understand how this
design actually changes our behavior and perception of heat. And uh what
choices do riders make uh when they are at the bus stop. And uh the goal
of this is to understand how we can influence those perceptions through
design.
And the second part of this project was uh to measure sun exposure for
people who have to walk to the bus stop. Uh We went into uh three
different neighborhoods in uh Phoenix and Edison, East Lake neighborhood,
downtown Phoenix and uh between Baseline and Southern on 21st, on 24th
street. And we actually walked with the cart in the sun in the summer and
that wasn't very pleasant experience. So we wanted to know how much
exposure does a typical bus rider gets when he uh has to walk to the bus
stop. And uh also to see what is the difference in sun exposure between
different neighborhoods that have different characteristics of urban form
, uh urban planning and micro climate. And also even to understand the
difference between different sides of the streets and uh maybe one side is
more vegetated or has more shade than the other. So then we can see how we
can mitigate sun exposure with design. Um That's it. Thank you.
So I was gonna induce Andrew Fraser from the school of sustainable
Engineering build environment. But he had something come up at the last
minute, David has agreed to channel Andrew and do his presentation. So you
all hold out your hands like this and hum mm have a look. A re you all set.
Andrew is uh quite sorry. He couldn't be here. Andrew is an assistant
research professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the built
environment at A SU and is a teammate of ours on a number of projects uh
related both to transit and understanding heat exposure in the city. Uh
But also thinking about cooling centers, which is a strategy that the the
city is invested in along with uh the County Health Department and the
Maricopa Association student of Governments. And I want to share uh just a
, a little bit of a flavor of the research that's happening at a SU uh
related to cooling centers. Uh First, this is a, a resource that uh a SU
faculty put together over the past few years. It's a website called Cool
me dot Today and it's a map of the regional cooling centers. It exists uh
both for Phoenix and some other cities. Although we need to update the
data uh from other from some other cities, there are maps distributed of
the cooling network by other regional agencies uh such as ma what's uh fun
or innovative about the Cool Me site is that it can allow you to find the
cooling center that's closest to your location uh at any given time. And
we're continuing to build up our infrastructure and work with uh teammates
in the city of Phoenix. Uh to think about how if and how this can be a
sustainable and useful tool for helping the types of people uh who would
actually be using cooling centers.
Uh But on, on the, on the heart of research that's happening uh from
Andrew's team uh related to understanding cooling centers. Uh We're really
trying to get a sense of how accessible the existing cooling cooling
center network is uh across the city. Uh What's shown here on the map are
two potential cooling center locations. The asterisk is one of our formal
cooling centers organized by the heat relief network uh in our region. And
the uh the library logo indicates where there's a a library and both of
these buildings are shown on the map to highlight that there are both
formal and informal cooling centers in our region. There are for formal
cooling centers. The addresses of which are routinely published as places
that who need heat relief during the summer are are encouraged and welcome
to visit. But there are informal cooling centers that are not part of this
heat relief network that exists on where people might also be seeking
refuge from the heat as well. Uh such as some of our public libraries. And
what Andrew's team has been doing is is thinking from a geographical
perspective about how accessible are these cooling center networks. So you
can see the the box that surrounds either of these potential cooling
centers is not a perfect circle or rectangle. It's this unusual shape
that's related to the accessibility of those places based on the geometry
of the road network. Uh They have thought very hard about what are the
different types of places that could act as cooling refuges of one form or
another in a formal or informal sense. And we can imagine that there are,
there are different costs associated with using some of these different
cooling centers. It might not be possible for example, to walk into every
boat bar or a restaurant in the city and expect that you can stay there
for an extended period of time without some uh discomfort or perhaps
without spending a little bit of money. So they've tried to assign some
cost functions to these different formal and informal cooling centers as
they're thinking about what truly is accessible uh based on the existing
Cooling Center network. They've developed an accessibility uh index and
there are some uh alarming statistics about the accessibility of cooling
centers. If you look just at the official cooling center column here. And
the bottom row for Maricopa County, assuming an average walking speed for
pedestrians. Uh uh The team determined that only 2% of the cooling centers
would be geographically accessible uh for pedestrians. Many of the folks
who are uh using cooling centers uh may not have access to their own
vehicle, uh may not be able to afford even public transportation fare. So
understanding what's within walking distance uh is really quite uh quite
important. If we think about more of the informal cooling centers such as
libraries or the commercial establishments, the accessibility uh increases
although perhaps not to a a satisfactory number. So the question then is,
where should we have more cooling centers? Uh These are the locations that
the team identified as possible cooling centers. These are all the
commercial venues that fit the criteria that you saw on the table before.
Uh and they asked the question if we could pick 10 of these, what would be
the best 10 locations if when the Human Services department here and their
collaborators at MAG are encouraging more folks to participate in the
network, which 10 facilities should they really lean on the most to ask
them uh to join in. And uh here's a map of where those 10 are, the slides
again will be available. We don't have the time to really discuss uh you
know why, why these points are where they are, but it's related both to
the vulne, uh our estimated vulnerability of the underlying population as
well as the uh geography of the road and sidewalk network uh in the city.
Uh Finally, I wanted to highlight just a couple of other projects that
have happened related to cooling centers. A su partnered with the County
and State Health Department to conduct a formal in person evaluation of
our regional cooling centers in 2014. So we visited every facility
observed what was happening there, talked to facility managers, surveyed
people who are using the facilities. There are extensive results of
available on the County Health Department's web page which is uh heat A
z.com. You can get right to where the reports are. This is one of the
results that I think is really encouraging. We asked the facility managers
, uh what are the costs associated to your facility with participating in
the heat relief network? And more than half of them said there are no
additional costs uh acting as a cooling center meant making space that's
already open and largely unused uh available for others. It was an easy
ask for them to join the cooling center network. They didn't perceive it
as a tremendous burden uh on their operations. Others of course,
identified uh some costs related to providing bottled water or, or staff
hours. But, but our main takeaway was that it's a, it's not a difficult
ask uh for a new organization to join the Heat Relief Network. And finally
uh another student, Joshua Ebel Hair from Public affairs, engaged in a
participate, participatory modeling type exercise with heat relief network
stakeholders. Uh The cartoon here is a, a screenshot of a computer
interface where he was simulating some of the dynamics of the heat relief
network. And he was asking uh folks to comment on if the model seemed to
be capturing the correct behaviors and what folks saw and an overwhelming
pattern uh that the folks who were engaging with this tool observed was
that man of the heat relief network facilities close at 5 p.m. If you've
ever walked outside at 530 or six o'clock PM, you know, it can still be
quite dangerously hot uh at that time of day. And we're, we're very
excited that the conversation has really shifted over the past couple of
years with the heat relief network coordinators to encourage facilities to
stay open uh and accessible to 67 or eight o'clock PM. Uh So we're quite
interested in cooling centers. We hope the city is too. Thanks for your
time.
Thanks, David. You made my life a lot more comfortable. Next time I go out
to the bar to get a drink. I would tell my wife, I'm going to a cooling
center.
Ok. So now we're gonna spend 10 minutes discussing some of the comfort um
topics that we looked at. Um What is it, what do you do today that you
think this comfort issue is important as to. So I can hear from some of
the group
I'm gonna start pointing. Come on, there we go. Josh Bednarik City of
Phoenix Planning and Development Department. II, I find there's an
interesting correlation between the, the thermal comfort and then the heat
island and the, the overall heat. So much of what we've been doing from a
coding standpoint or a zoning standpoint is trying to enhance the thermal
comfort on the street through shade and then the placement of buildings.
But based on the previous presentation that may be having adverse effect
on the overall temperature. So III I think that'll be something that we
wanna continue to discuss as we, as we look to expand the walkable urban
code throughout the city, which really isn't concerned about lot coverage
anymore. We're, we're, we're really wanted to maximize that lot. What are
some provisions in the code that we should be thinking about with respect
to the overall temperature. Our main focus has been en enhancing that
thermal comfort on the right of way with the provi pro provision of street
trees or other types of shading mechanisms. But I don't think we've been
necessarily been focused on how the the the densification of the area has
had on the overall uh surface temp temperatures. Iii I find the two topics
uh interesting together.
So I mean, I'll, I'll suggest that I think that the, the, the, the
research that we're doing right now and comfort is sort of shifting
thinking a little bit because the research you saw in the first part of
the day was really the earlier research we did. What are the temperatures
we're seeing what's doing that? Now, we're focusing more on just what is
the comfort of people, which really is, our goal is we want people to be,
be comfortable. And so I think it's possible to have areas in the city
where it's hot but there aren't, people don't congregate and they don't go
in areas of the city where it's cooler where people are going. So this
concept of where people are and where they move, where they walk to the
bus station, how did they get there? Um How do they move in their
neighborhoods? How do they walk from the parking lot into the commercial
center? Where are they in the commercial center? There? There are places
where people are gonna be in congregate and having an understanding of
where is that? And how do we make those areas cooler? Um I, I think it's
something we need to be doing more of and working with you more on in
terms of when you're doing site plan review or doing zoning, we can, can
discuss those types of things.
Sorry. Oh, Susan, again,
there's a great line in one of the health affairs uh documents where a, a
professor, I mean, a physician said a patient told him if you really want
to help me with my blood pressure, help me with my utility bill. I use
that in lots of speeches I give because I say if it's 90 degrees in my
house, you can throw all the meds at me you want and my blood pressure
still won't go down. So one thing to think about in your research is
talking with federally qualified health centers. I mean, working this in
because that's where it's physicians, particularly with chronically ill
patients in lower income areas. They can be helpful to this. I in looking
at it and trying to figure out they don't ask those questions. We talk a
lot about the social determinants of health and how it impacts. But as
you're looking through this tapping into that medical community,
particularly with the uh what's called FQH CS because they are dealing
with the patients uh that are seeing the impacts of it. They're not asking
these questions. And so they are just literally throwing meds at people
without asking the underlying for those underlying causes. But that's
where our community paramedic program around the state has become very,
very helpful. They're going in and assessing those needs almost every city.
But Phoenix in Maricopa County has that. But so looking at those
connections, as you're looking at your research, I think can be very
valuable to both helping the people you're studying a and also uh helping
your uh uh information and research.
Carrot over here. Yeah.
Mm
So, so I have a question and it relates kind to both um of the topic areas
that we've talked about. Um 01 of the big barriers that we encounter as we
think about how to impact uh policies in, in our city. And uh that, that
affect the comfort of our residents is costs and costs, not just of
implementing a solution, but the long term costs of the solution. You know
, we talked a little bit about pervious pavement and what what the long
term costs of, of keeping that effective in the long run are. And so I'm
just curious to the extent. I mean, this research is fantastic and very uh
enlightening and, and helpful. But, but as as we think about making policy
and implementing it here in our community, one of the big drivers of our
conversations with our elected officials, our residents developers, you
know, the people who are building things in our community is is costs. So
I'm just curious how, how much of that is, is part of what you're thinking
about.
Anybody want to respond to that. If, if I respond to it, I'm gonna, you
know, lock a su into some area that's gonna have to do some work on that.
David. Go ahead, Karen. Thanks for your question. I think you've
highlighted a need where we need to bring more people to the table. Uh The
from the health statistics perspective. Uh For example, we know that a
heat related hospitalization in the country averages something like $5500.
So if you multiply $5500 by something like the 1000 hospitalizations we
have or several 100 we have each summer, you can get a pretty large number
pretty quickly. What I don't understand as a, a climate and comfort
researcher is where those costs fall between public and private markets
and insurance. And I think that's something that we as a community could
learn more about to help you make that case. That's some of these costs uh
do fall upon the public and we could recoup those costs if the right
weatherization or building assistance or energy assistance programs uh
were in place ahead of time before some of these costs occur. Uh We, we've
, we have heard you and are thinking about this a little bit and we've
been thinking about this at transit stops. Uh But we didn't have time to
show, for example, uh uh is we try to calculate per every dollar that
Joe's team is spending on shade structures. Uh What does that get you in
terms of comfort? And we've determined that it's something like. Uh so
when you raised your hand up and voted in Ariana survey, we think a dollar
moves people about two points on that scale when they're at shade
structures. So that's our return on investment, two points on a thermal
comfort scale. $1. Is that a good investment? I mean, that's probably not
for us to decide. But, but we have heard you and are trying to start to
think about the return on investment in some, some clever ways. We we have
done some other things to relate to that. So we created this modular
design for the bus stop so that you could implement some of these shading
features in a modular fashion and make it a little bit cheaper to maintain.
But certainly some of the things we're talking about might suggest new
programs and new, new things. But I think a lot more of what we're saying
is, is that you could probably be more effective comfort wise with the
money you're already spending, that you don't need to spend any more money
, just how you're doing your activities now and how you're spending money.
Now, if you looked at the cooling, you could be better at cooling using
the same amount of money and, and that this concept of comfort where
people are in comfort and what you do to make them comfort and recognizing
there may be hot areas and may be cool areas um is one way to, is to do
that. So how, how many of you manage a facility or manage a service where
you have people coming in from outside where it's the heat, nobody, nobody
, nobody's managing service. Come on. Some of you must manage services
where people coming in there. I mean, they're coming from the outside,
they're coming in the heat.
Think about it. If you have people. Do you, how many of you manage service
where people come to you?
Nobody. No. Yep, there. Ok. I work with
very, um where individuals are in apartment complexes, uh especially
during the summer that we had tons of apartments uh without air
conditioning. So working with the neighborhoods, um we have seen a rise
and a lot of those complaints where there maybe a lot of the cooling uh
shelters are not readily available for them or they have transportation
issues. But I can definitely say I've seen an increase in a lot of those
situations. So I I would suggest anybody who's providing service to people
coming to a facility um has this comfort issue that you're gonna need to
deal with within in the summer in terms of your customers and how you can
keep them cool. Ok. So thanks for the discussion. If I could just add one
point on your comment here, I think uh I think you asked about employees
as well and that might be another area we can think about recovering costs
is think about thermal comfort and, and uh you know, work related uh
delays or illnesses are related to summer heat. That might be an area
where it's very easy within our current accounting infrastructure to think
about what costs are. And we could, we could do some of this work perhaps
more internally as well as facing the community.
All right. So we're gonna give you 10 minutes to take a break. Um, uh, no
more than that. In fact, in fact, we're not even gonna take 10 minutes if
you could be back here by a quarter till, um, we're gonna break until a
quarter till.
So there's, there's, there's ladies rooms on every floor.
All right, if I can get you to take your seats,
someone told me there's a prize under every seat. So if you look under
your seat,
so if I can get you to see, get you take your seats, please, so we can get
started.
All right. So I'm gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna shift to another topic
and this topic is gonna be more focused on thinking about the future and
planning for the future in terms of heat and comfort. And I'm, we start us
out will be Halley Aiken, who's going, who's from the school?
Sustainability?
Hi. So, um I'm not a heat researcher, but I do research vulnerability and
particularly vulnerability at the household level in a variety of
different hazards. So, what I'm gonna do now is just provide you kind of a
summary, conceptualist summary of uh what we've already been talking about
in, in different ways uh in previous presentations to try and think about
how we might approach vulnerability assessment moving forward. So
vulnerability, as I believe, David already said at the beginning, um is we
generally think of it as composed of three attributes exposure. Here,
we're talking about heat sensitivity, which obviously varies across a
population according to its characteristics where it lives. Uh What kind
of attributes the population has an adaptive capacity, which is the
ability to mitigate uh and mediate some of that vulnerability. Um So we
can think of uh households like this uh in Phoenix where um we might uh
see that it has no vegetation might be a high levels of rental properties
, low uh capacity for investment in vegetation maintenance. There may be
long-standing inequities or differences in infrastructure development,
access to flood irrigation that allows for mature vegetation. For example
, uh capacity to invest in energy efficiency. You have community
characteristics, uh ethnic composition, which can create communication
challenges. It can create barriers to understanding cultural behaviors and
practices if we make assumptions about how people operate. But it can also
mean that there may be networks and social organization that it is not
really easily perceptible that serves as an adaptive mechanism. And these
are po pose challenges as we try to think about what are good indicators
of vulnerability because these are often attributes that are very hard to
get at from existing statistics. You need to kind of be out there uh to
understand uh how communities are organized and what they know what they
don't know. Then of course, you have uh the population itself um we know
in heat, uh elderly residents uh are often particularly uh vulnerable for
their physiological and health uh um characteristics. Um But you also have
different characteristics in terms of perception of risk. If you are
dealing with he on a regular basis, this may be something that you're more
willing and able to confront uh individually if you have that the
resources available than someone who is perhaps buffered uh by the
infrastructure around them. And may not be actually thinking on a daily
basis about how to cope and preparing for that. Um And then finally, as
we've, he heard from other presentations, the public infrastructure
services and access to those services is going to provide a significant uh
influence on your vulnerability. So we can see these same features uh at a
different end of the spectrum in a neighborhood where you have perhaps
more homeownership, more capacity to invest in uh utilities and efficiency.
You may have higher energy intensity of those homes, which has other
implications at higher scales in terms of water, uh utility uh demand on
grids, et cetera. Um And you may have uh populations that have uh uh with
income greater capacity to respond and cope with an uh particular crisis
event, but they may also have a lower risk perception because they are
confident in their ability to cope and more reliant on, for example,
public services, public infrastructure and confident that that's gonna be
there for them. Uh um And it may not as we've seen in some of the current
crises uh in Puerto Rico and other places where suddenly your electric
grid is not available or your transportation network is not uh accessible.
So when we're thinking about vulnerability assessments, I think one of
the things that we need to be uh cognizant of is that any particular
environmental hazard is operating in a context that's highly dynamic. So
when we think of a vile vulnerability assessment in 2007, 2008 in the
middle of the, the recession, that may be very different context than
today, uh where we might have different population, different political uh
demographic stressors that are coincident uh with environmental stress on
different populations. So we need to understand what those trends are and
how they are affecting populations differently. We need to think of these
spatial disparities and exposure to hazards and what's behind that and
particularly the histories of investment in infrastructure and how that
kind of builds up over time to create kind of legacies in the landscape
and the built environment uh that can be hard to mediate. Um We need to
think about these social inequities in uh coping and adaptation strategies.
Uh Where are those? Is it just about income? How much of that relates to
access to services and infrastructure and then population attributes that
can amplify or mediate some of those uh sensitivities. And then I'd like
to get down to the individual level and this implies really close
interaction with uh individuals in an in uh particular context, how do
people perceive their own capacity? It's something we call self efficacy.
Um Do people feel like they are capable of adopting and coping and
responding? What is the basis of that sentiment? Is that something that is
implies a reliance on other actors, other services, public sector being
there doing things for them uh or not, how kind of self reliant uh is the
population? Um And then also what they're most worried about if, for
example, heat is not the primary concern is I think um uh is it Suzanne
who uh said in terms of it could be your utility bill or something else?
Um that may be actually what's motivating your behavior. And so trying to
motivate people to take action when they have other priorities and other
immediate concerns um is not going to be very effective. So, in short,
what I would advocate for moving forward is we really need to have a uh
dialogue. And I know a lot of you are already involved in this here in
Phoenix. So this is not a novel but to work with residents in not in of
all categories and trying to understand how do we have a shared
responsibility for and building uh capacities to vulnerability reduction.
And this requires qualitative work. It requires significantly engaged
work to let people define what are the answers to these questions here?
How do they understand their own vulnerability? And it's based on that
basis that we can start making effective strategies moving forward. Thank
you.
So now we're gonna have Nick Weller for also from school sustainability.
All right, good morning, everyone. Um So I work with the uh Consortium for
Science Policy and Outcomes at a su along with the school sustainability.
Uh We recently conducted a rather large public forum as part of a project
to conduct um uh public forums at uh eight sites across the country on
climate resilience. Um This, this was funded by Noah. Um So the, the most
recent one we just had in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, Mark Hartman was
actually our, our lunchtime speaker. He did a wonderful job. Everyone
loved it. Um We, I haven't had too much time. It was just two weeks ago to
run through the data, but I'll talk a little bit about um the structure of
this type of engagement. Why we think it's important for thinking about
heat resilience um And start to present some of the initial um findings we
had.
Um So the forum was based on a model of engagement that we've used for a
wide variety of other projects, including informing decision making at
NASA and helping um at some un climate negotiations. Uh The broad goals of
these particular forums were to engage uh engage the public in learning um
and making decisions about resilience, communicating about um how these
hazards like extreme heat and drought will actually impact their community
um promoting res uh informed and respectful dialogue among the
participants themselves and then actually collecting what we're calling
informed public opinion. So having people learn about the issue um over
the day long deliberation and then actually getting their opinion about
what this uh what this looked like. Um The board on the, on the, I guess
it's your right side of the screen, no, left side of the screen. Um For
all of you, that's one of the game boards that's the center of our
activity. Um The activity, we, we asked participants to think about uh
three broad strategies for dealing with extreme heat. One was kind of uh
cooling the city through shade measures, trees, shade structures. Another
one's protecting infrastructure to make sure that um key services are
available when we need them. And the last one was thinking about um public
health impacts and public safety
uh to make the content we work with partners around uh around the valley
um in from uh the organizations that you can see up on the slide. Um We,
we tried to make sure that the the actual content that we were presenting
to um to the public was representative of both kind of the scientific um
um assessment that, that we're dealing with as well as decision making
priorities across all these various organizations. Um In terms of the
participants themselves, we really focused on trying to get a diverse
group um of part of public participants to the uh to the Science Center
for this forum, we had 66 people show up, which was actually um fantastic.
That is right where we wanted to be, this map shows um based on zip code
where a lot of our participants came, they broadly represent the, the
demographic diversity of the uh of the uh um Central Arizona in terms of
age education, ethnicity and income. We were really happy with um with how
uh uh the group turned out um in terms of the actual uh some of the
initial initial results. Um And these are actually based on some of some
of the other forms that we've done in other cities. Not yet the Phoenix
stuff because we haven't had time to, to analyze them. Um But forum
participants actually learn a lot about climate resilience at these um at
these events. Um So you can see that in the, in the two, the two graphs on
the, on your left about the increase in knowledge um about strategies and
the increase in knowledge about uh the impacts of the strategies for
dealing with heat have on community that dark yellow is the um perce
percentage of respondents that said um um they, their knowledge increased
a lot. Um On the other side, um We also see that participants by engaging
in these kinds of deliberations, uh become more interested in learning
about these hazards. Um And they become more interested in actually seeing
action at the local level uh to deal with these hazards. Um which is what
those two charts on the right show. Um In terms of some of the other data
we've collected, there's lots and lots of participant recordings, notes,
things like that, more qualitative data and we haven't had time to call
through. Um but we do see some um some um encouraging things on a lot of
that data. For instance, we know that a lot of the participants think
about these uh problems in a very complex way. Uh One of the tables at our
uh forum suggested very uh diverse uh response to thinking about heat. Um
combining uh impact or combining strategies from uh thinking about cooling
a city, protecting infrastructure um and protecting public health. Uh And
they recognize the interconnections between all those things that it's not
a one sided problem. Much as like uh much as uh we've heard today through
um all the other presentations um in terms of the opinions of what people
actually preferred. Uh Most people saw that protecting infrastructure and
thinking about keeping key services available during extreme heat events
was their, was their most uh their number one priority. And there's some
illustrative quotes we have up there about that um cooling the city for
thermal comfort reasons. And to um and to reduce the urban he heat island
impact was a secondary focus. And finally ensuring safety was another one
um from examining the um audio recordings from, from um and the notes from
all this, we'll actually be able to get a lot more data and not
necessarily this, these broad percentages uh but much more rich data about
why people are thinking about these things. Why is it that um protecting
infrastructure might have been more important to someone rather than
protecting uh that? Right, rather than thinking about providing shade for
the community. Um So we're, we're really looking forward to looking
through some of that data. Um and coming up with uh coming up with some um
some interesting findings on, on what local residents are thinking, why,
why they're prioritizing the things they're prioritizing and what that
might mean for the future of making a cooler Phoenix. Thanks.
Thanks Nick. So now we have uh Marta Barbes Blazquez.
OK, good. Well done, well done. I am impressed. Um Thank you. Um Yeah. Can
you hear me? Yeah. Um So yeah, so I am Marta Pervez and I'm a postdoctoral
fellow with the School of Sustainability. Um And today I'm here to talk
about a course uh that I've been involved with this term um As well today
, I'm here on behalf of the actual course, instructors who are Paul Cosio
and Alice uh Hargrove and they couldn't make it. Um So sorry. Uh The
course in question is the cooler Phoenix neighborhoods. Um And we're
taking South Mountain Village as a, as a case study. So um I'm gonna
highlight a couple of interesting aspects of this course. And then at the
end, I'm gonna uh maybe throw an opportunity uh uh for interacting with
the city of Phoenix. Um So the course is offered this term and it combines
upper year uh undergraduate students from the School of Design and it's
also cross listed. Um And so it brings together uh the students uh from
the School of Design as well as phd students from the School of
Sustainability. A couple of them are are in the room. And so I think that
is interesting um to bring those different types of expertise because
that's where you create those space spaces for innovation and for thinking
differently. Um as well as kind of need to work with the students who are
upper level because it's not just about giving them um more theoretical
framing, but actually they get to do things. And so this is actually one
of the pictures of our first site visit where the students really get to
know the area. So I, I think I, I really appreciate like the practical
aspect of the course um as well. The course tries to bring together
different people um and different uh projects and initiatives that are
occurring um at a su so things that are happening at the School of Design
, uh things that are happening at the, which is the urban resilience to
extreme events, sustainability Research Network, which Um I'm part of um
as well as previous work that has been done in, in Phoenix in the long
term ecological research uh station. And so we're trying to uh articulate
a little bit better and coordinate a little bit better uh at the A sc
level, but also reaching out to the community. Uh So some of the, you know
, we cannot get the students, not in this iteration of the course, we
cannot get the students to work with the community. But at least we try to
bring the community to them, which is sort of like the second best uh
thing that we can do. So, uh there's a lot of speakers from, from the
community uh that come and, you know, they give their perspectives and
they try to just create a more well rounded um idea about uh South
Mountain Village. Um So, yes, so I just listen to a couple of the speakers
that have come. Uh And what is it that the students do in the course? Um
So they have the, there's three parts of the course, the first uh part,
we're trying to get them to think about uh the, the, the regional scale
and the local scale. And so uh how maybe regional trends you um are
connected to local uh things that they are observing and some of the cross
cutting themes that they are tackling are uh people. So like social um
questions that are South Mountain that, that emerge from South uh mountain
Village um as well, heat figures prominently uh water connectivity and as
well as wildlife corridors. And so those are cross cutting themes and the
students are bringing together data and are trying to uh figure out where
are the points of connection. And you know, uh they have a little bit of
free range. So it's interesting to see uh how they're making sense of and
of the connections uh between these themes. And then uh the second part
which they are starting to work on now is to uh develop a master plan
where they're trying to give some recommendations on how we could use
green infrastructure um to improve South Mountain Village. So, and th
those would be high level recommendations. Um And the last thing that they
haven't started working on, but they will um is to do uh to take it one
level more concrete and to actually do a site scale uh demonstration. So
take one little piece that could be a bus stop, that could be a portion of
a street uh a parcel. So something small but that, that they can actually
design. Um And so Paul did tell me to let you know that is not too late to
include if you have something that, that is uh site scale and that you
think that it would be interesting to have some uh design students aided
by some uh phd students uh work on and, and come up with some interest in
innovative design. Um you know, find me after and uh we can talk. Thank
you.
Thanks. So, I'm gonna introduce Melissa Davison. It's also with the school
Sustainability.
Thanks, Ray. Good morning, everyone. I'm Melissa Davidson School
Sustainability. And I'm here to talk to you today about future scenarios
for the Phoenix region uh for the past 2.5 years cap A researchers have
been working with over 20 governmental and nongovernmental organizations
to envision the future, the long term future of the Phoenix region. And
this slide is kind of a snapshot of that effort. Um We developed six
different visions for the future. And again, this is long term future
thinking. 2060 I'm gonna briefly go through each of the scenarios to give
you an idea of the different themes that we explored and the different
strategies that they employ. Uh the top row represents our adaptive
scenarios and these were designed to respond to a specific climate event.
Uh You can see adaptive flood, the feature there is a multi scale network
of floodplains parks and during extreme precipitation events, the freeway
system even becomes an emergency floodplain. The drought scenario focuses
on long term water security through banking and conservation. You can see
that the agriculture and urban development in that future decreases
significantly to help achieve those goals. The adaptive heat uh was really
focused on human scale thermal comfort and uh heat equity addressed
through green and gray infrastructure specifically um concentrated in
currently underserved areas. Our bottom row represents these kind of
radical departures from the status quo. These are our transformative
scenarios and that's really evident in the healthy harvest hubs where you
can see we re envisioned urban form food and our energy system and someone
was a little wacky but it was kind of fun. The middle one is the Emerald
City and that one ended up balancing targets for heat, drought and flood.
And they did this through a variety of really interesting design
techniques such as on site water capture and reuse to support vegetation
for cooling. And our last one is our waste scenario. And uh this sort of
idealized the future, they reduced water energy and material waste through
various reuse development um and efficiency standards. So you can see that
this is a really diverse set of futures and the uh different themes have
been emphasized and that's a really um unique feature of this project and
it allows us to think about heat and the multiple interacting scales at
which uh we've heard heat occurs today. So for instance, um one of the
scenarios like I mentioned, adaptive heat was really interested in thermal
comfort. And what are the strategies that can, that can really help
improve thermal comfort and walk ability, shade provision. We've heard
some of those today and we can think about a particular place and what
those strategies look like and then zoom out to the city scale and see how
those if that's the standard across our urban environment. What does that
mean for urban Heat Island? Conversely, we can start with Urban Heat
Island and think about surface temperature. Uh and what are the particular
land use and infrastructure strategies that are gonna mitigate urban Heat
Island at a regional scale and zoom into particular places and see how
that plays out for thermal comfort. We can also think about other elements
that have been talked about today that are important health and heat, heat
related mortality, energy use. I mean, those can be entry points to think
about heat specific strategies and we can explore what that means for heat
at the local and the regional scale. Just to give you an example of how
this plays out in one of our scenarios. This is the Emerald City again
sort of a fan favorite among our participants. And you can see that it
performs really, really well in terms of Urban Heat Island, it mitigates
it well, it's very cool and a lot of that is due to the massive changes in
green infrastructure and reduction in impervious surfaces. But if you zoom
into a place that's pretty cool regionally, there are still significant
temperature differences depending on where you're standing in this future.
If you're not under a tree under a shade structure by the canal, it's
still really, really hot. So we can explore how some of these strategies
scale up or do not and scale down or do not. Another element of scenarios
that's really fun is considering tradeoffs, not just among heat in
different scales of heat, but other um urban services that are important
such as the provision of water and water availability. Um The point of
this slide is that one of these scenarios is really, really hot, it's red
, it does not rem mitigate the Urban Heat Island well, but it performs
better in terms of banking water. This figure is banked water over time.
You can think about this as sort of a water security figure. Um and the
Emerald City which is actually quite cool, performs less well in terms of
water security. And that is largely a result of the water needed to
support that massive greening citywide. So these are sorts of some of the
sorts of things that we can explore um in our scenario work. And the last
thing I wanna point out is where we're going. Uh We've done this region
wide and while we've been able to zoom into particular places, we actually
wanna get into a village and think about what does a vision in the future
for South Mountain village look like and largely for the many of the
reasons that were already discussed today. This village was chosen because
of its uh disproportionate. Um The disproportionate heat impacts in that
area. We want to explore Urban Heat Island extreme heat and health, as
long as, as well as other categories such as transportation, flooding and
drought and compare what strategies work well at the local village scale
as well as at the regional scale. Thanks,
thanks Melissa. So now we're gonna have Matt Georgescu from the School of
Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Matt. Thanks.
Thank you, Ray. Thank you everybody. Uh The purpose of uh the next five
minutes or so is for me to provide a uh an assessment of the utility of
climate models to address some of the uh heat issues that we've been
discussing so far from a local to a regional scale. And so when we're
thinking about climate models, it's very important to keep in mind that
these are process based uh models, they are not crystal balls. Uh We have
to ensure that they properly represent uh observed historical
meteorological representation. So I'm showing you uh a few things on uh my
left, on your right, the top panel and the bottom panel are two stations,
Phoenix and Sacaton uh near surface temperatures from about 19 forties uh
to about 2015. This is data that was extended from a recent publication
that we had, that was provided to me by a colleague from uh School of
Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, Mohammed Mousawi. And you see a
couple of striking differences between the uh two stations on the uh right
hand side, Phoenix, the uh red line or the red uh dots, the average
temperature has been increasing and we're all aware of that, but we may
not be aware of what is driving that as much. And um that becomes quite
obvious when we compare and contrast panel A to panel B Sacaton. Once
again, we look at the red contour and we see an increase in temperature uh
of roughly half that compared to Phoenix. And so we ask ourselves, what is
the difference between these two stations? One of them uh within an urban
core has been surrounded by urbanizing parcels for decades and decades.
And one is not. And we diagnosed this through um a difference in the darn
temperature range, the difference between the maximum and the minimum
temperature. That is the uh blue line that you see decreasing for Phoenix.
In other words, our minima are increasing with each subsequent uh year.
That is not the case for Sacaton, which is not urbanizing. And so it is
very important to keep in context whenever we're doing any sort of uh
meteorological or climatological modeling to keep in context that we need
not just an average temperature but a representative temperature that
appropriately characterizes the entire diurnal cycle. In other words,
every single hour of every day. And we try to do this in most of our work
and compare our uh in in our case, the weather research and forecasting
model on the right hand side, the uh red contour and compare that to
observed values and try to ensure that the evolution of temperature
throughout the day. Because as humans, we don't live in an average world,
we live in a world of extremes that might be that we're outside at 5 p.m.
when the maximum temperature is recorded or it might be that we're outside
at 5 a.m. or at some intervening time.
So uh a lot of what's on this slide has already been discussed, but I just
want to briefly say that our meteorological and climatological models must
of course include the receipt and and and properly characterize the
receipt of incoming solar radiation by the built environment facades
network, so on and so forth and appropriately characterized the way we
utilize energy. So Dave Saylor already talked about anthropogenic heating
, for example, uh what sort of irrigation systems that we use? Uh the
density of buildings, the morphological characteristics that we have heard
about previously and some of the adaptation strategies that we are all
very familiar green roofs, uh trees for provision of straight uh shading
structures, uh cool materials, not just cool roofs. These are all
essential elements that can essentially be used as plug and play into our
numerical framework so that we can address some of the implications
associated with these different land use strategies. And some of the work
that we've uh conducted initially for Arizona and then on a uh scale for
the entire uh continental United States uh really characterizes the effect
of the principal forcing agents that um govern the way cities are changing
from a climatic perspective. And that is to say that we tend to think
about uh our urban climate as in a vacuum. But in actual reality, there
are two stressors that impact the meteorology and the climate within urban
environments. And those are the uh effect of greenhouse gas emissions and
the impact of the build infrastructure. And so the panels uh that you see
in front of you uh are a simple ratio of the impact of urban induced
warming. This is for scenarios conducted uh with data obtained from the
Maricopa Association of Governments and then input into our uh climate
models. They are a ratio of urban induced warming relative to greenhouse
gas emissions. Uh And what you see here really the take home message is
that these two forcing agents, these two stressors in terms of temperature
are are of similar order of magnitude simultaneously. That's good news and
that's bad news from a global perspective, we cannot change. For example,
the emissions of Los Angeles or Tokyo or New York City. On the flip side,
we can't change how we uh structure and design our uh land surface
characteristics specific to our particular city. And so you've already
heard uh Melissa uh initiate discussion about the designing of future
scenarios. And so these are the uh same representations from a land
surface perspective of the uh futures uh work that she has been leading.
Uh this is work that is in preparation and we've run this uh these land
surface conditions and put them into our regional climate models to try to
diagnose what the impacts are across the darnel scale in terms of 2 m
temperature. And what you see from one of these scenarios, strategic
scenarios, which is essentially a complete replacement of existing
agriculture to urban infrastructure and an infill of currently vacant uh
spaces within the Phoenix um uh borders and the uh adjacent metropolitan
area. And what we see here is that for daytime impact. So the image that
states 5 p.m. there are not really noticeable effects on 2 m temperature,
right? So when we're thinking about urban heat Island, the daytime effect
is really negligible. But when we're looking at five m again against the
entirety of the diurnal cycle, what we see is a significant increase on
the order of about two °C, 2 to 3 °C or about 4 to 6 °F. With that said,
I'll wrap it up there because I'm getting the uh stink eye from our
wonderful colleague, uh happy to extend the uh conversation and really to
work with many of you on some uh of the exciting collaborations that I
think are emerging here. Thank you.
So now we have Matt Fraser from the School of Sustainable Engineering and
build Environment. Thank you. Um Before I begin, let me just thank uh
everybody. Well, first of all, the organizers for this opportunity to kind
of change topics and talk a little bit about air quality and thanks to all
of you for your attention uh, here today. So I'm gonna do things a little
different. Uh I want to tell you about some of the air quality, uh,
studies that my group has, um, uh, helped lead uh, here in the valley. Uh
, and I'm not going to give you the conclusions. I'm gonna make you fill
out one of these forms or, or talk to me afterwards uh to get more
information about the details of what we found through these studies.
First, uh the first one that's located up there. Uh One of our first
studies here in the Valley was on the urban fringe. Uh And the urban
Fringe is interesting because you have this influx of urban sources such
as transportation and existing agricultural sources and a new population
that's suddenly being exposed to this. So we wanted to understand what the
sources are on the urban fringe. Uh We also looked um as Mark mentioned at
the beginning, sometimes two communities very geographically close can
have very different environments. And so the second study up there, we
actually had two sites in South Phoenix. Uh And we had one site in Tempe
and we are comparing and contrasting the exposure of those communities to
heavy metal specifically uh and also to other particulate air pollutants
um to understand how different communities get exposed even though they're
geographically quite so quite close together. Uh The third study which is
off the map is actually down in Pinal County. Uh And we were looking at
the contribution of course particulates to their local air quality issues
down in Pinal County. And while a lot of the focus is on fine particles
from things like diesel vehicles, uh the co contribution is also important
to characterize. And then finally, the fourth study up there, we had two
sites uh and we actually had one site about five miles north of here. Um
looking at the composition of organic vapors uh because those are some of
the emissions that contribute to ground level ozone formation. Uh and
looking at the ambient measurement of those vapors and saying, what can we
find out about the ambient measurements? And how does that compare uh to
what the emission inventories uh are doing? So we did one site just uh
north of here and then one site way out on the urban fringe in uh Queen
Valley uh as a comparison uh back and forth between there. Now, maybe I uh
have skipped ahead already and I wanna um make sure that you appreciate
that there is a link between urban heat and urban air quality. Uh And
maybe I'm preaching to the choir here. Uh But first, you should appreciate
that the pollutants of concern here being ground level ozone and
particulate air pollutants are linked to health outcomes. Uh whether you
look at things like hospitalizations due to asthma uh or other
epidemiological studies here in Phoenix, we know that the exposure to
these pollutants uh is causing a health impact. And so when we talk about
the burden of heat, uh we should also think about how does that correspond
or how does that augment or how does that exacerbate the impacts
associated uh with air quality? And the next thing I want to tell you is
that increased temperatures do result in increased emissions. Now, an air
quality person like me, we talk about breathing emissions and I'm not
talking about breath. Uh I'm talking about organic volatile material which
is stored. Uh and as things get hot things expand uh and things volatilize.
Uh And so you'll get emissions of gasoline vapors uh to the atmosphere
just by changing temperatures because things expand and contract, expand
and contract. We've done a very good job with things like automobiles by
having sealing gas cans. Uh So you don't have your car sitting in the sun
getting hot and emitting vapors to the atmosphere, but there are still a
lot of breathing emissions out there, whether it's uh backyard, gasoline
powered lawn mowers or gasoline storage uh in small gasoline containers.
That still is an important thing. And the other impact of increased
temperatures is in what I'll call fugitive dust emissions. Fugitive dust
emissions is exactly what it sounds like it's dust from a variety of
sources. And one of the biggest impacts on fugitive dust emissions is soil
moisture and increasing temperatures decreases soil moisture. So as
temperatures get hot, you get higher emissions of these fugitive emissions
, whether it's from construction sites in the center of the city, uh or
abandon agriculture at the edge of the city. Uh increasing temperatures is
leading to increased fugitive emissions. Now, what are we going to do
about this? I want to say that there are opportunities to go after both
urban heat and air quality through solutions. And you know, maybe I don't
want to offend anybody in this room. Uh And maybe this is a little
controversial, but the first thing I wanna tell you, there is absolutely
positively no air quality benefit of driving around an empty bus. So what
we should do is we should focus on the improving the appeal of mass
transit. A lot of people have talked about improving or reducing barriers
to people taking mass transit and along with mass transit, alternative
transportation also includes walking, biking and all those things that can
be improved by addressing barriers and one of the barriers is heat.
Next, let me also mention that we're in the middle of a massive deployment
of surfaces, whether those are urban forestry or shade structures or even
our photovoltaic systems. We're putting these massive amounts of surface
area out there and we should take the opportunity to think strategically
about how surfaces can remove air pollutants
and finally fugitive dust emissions. This is something that I think uh A
SS U has a lot of active research in uh these include large area
treatments. So think of abandoned agriculture at the edge of the city. How
can we treat those to mitigate dust and also more localized treatment uh
in uh uh construction sites near the urban core. So with that, I will uh
step down and thank you very much for your attention.
Last, but not least we have Melissa Guererro and um I wanna add something.
Melissa has been really at the center of everything you've seen today. Um
She, she wrangled all of the faculty to generate presentations and keep
them to a couple of slides, five minutes. Um She put the agenda. So I, I'd
like you all to give a round of applause first for Melissa Bar for
organizing it. Thanks.
Does this mean I get more than five minutes? Right?
Um First, I'd like to talk about the Cooler Phoenix project that I've been
working on with Ray Kui, uh Chuck Redman and Dave Houla and Arian Middle
where we've been trying to work with the city so that uh we can coalesce
the forces of a su and the city people to both create meaningful research
and have the city help researchers um be uh have more access and make more
meaningful research. And there's already uh a research team that's up and
running Um I know that Dave Hondo is on it with the Transportation folks.
And right now we're trying to get another research team together that's
dealing with the choice neighborhoods and uh we will be meeting shortly.
Um This is also all this information that you see here. Uh I think in the
break slides has a URL and all of the information will be posted on that
URL and it's resting at Dave Saylor's Urban Climate Center website. So now
I'm gonna talk about nature's cooling system and this is,
this is actually another collaborative effort. And what we're really doing
is addressing heat through a health equity lens. And we're looking at it
from a grass tops uh approach and then also a grassroots approach. And uh
it's being led by the Nature Conservancy, Maggie Messerschmidt wave. Your
hand is uh basically running the show there with a lot of Cooper operation
from um these other partners that you see.
Oh, sorry that you can't see this. I thought that would be a little bit
more clear. So this is our workflow and the grass tops is
the grass tops is really the Maricopa County Association of Governments
where we're really looking to provide information about heat reduction and
the landscape scale. And we're approaching this through planners, through
engineers, through conservation professionals. And then also that informed
by the grassroots by the people on the ground. And we're trying to work
through our partners and neighborhood associations um homeowners
Associations and other community members. And the important point here is
that one of these is going to inform the other and vice versa. So
we've already started this by having a presentation for the Arizona
Chapter of the American Planning Association. And we had presentations on
the, uh I and extreme heat and then the health health impacts of that. And
then we basically had a discussion about good design principles and these
were primarily urban planners that were in the room and then we broke out
into three groups. One was about the urban environment, another one was
about the suburban environment and then the peri urban environment. And
what would you do to cool these spaces and what are some of the hurdles
that you have in terms of cooling these spaces? And a lot of the um a lot
of the discussion probably has been mentioned already cool roofs and trees.
But there are other things that were quite interesting and rather
unwieldy with figuring out how to work with. One is that our financial
institutions are not set up to provide loans and financing for really
innovative designs. Another one is that building code, we know that there
are services that are better in terms of mitigating urban heat and yet
they are not necessarily allowed based upon coding such as Rammed Earth
community cohesion and uh the Dominic car culture also came up quite,
quite frequently. We're gonna take that information and combine it with
the information that Nick Weller has done at the Arizona Science Center
and we're going to bring it back to uh the Maricopa Association of
Governments. Uh later this year.
We've also been working at the neighborhood scale and we've picked three
neighborhoods to work with. One is the choice neighborhoods, another one
is in South Mountain and this is a much smaller scale than the work that's
being done through uh Paul Coo's group, but it certainly can be informed
there. And then the third one is in Mesa. And we've selected all these
neighborhoods based upon, on their heat vulnerability, based upon uh
negative public health outcomes due to heat. Um the presence of future
development, we want to be able to have these people develop heat action
plans for their own community and then also experience in the community.
All of these neighborhoods are in or near the neighborhoods that Abby had
talked about for Cap LTR.
And one of the unique ways that we are doing this is that we are doing
this through uh whole measures for urban conservation. And this is a
framework to ensure that our program is really looking at uh what we're
going to do through the lens of socio-economic impact and equity. So in
conclusion, this is a top down and bottom up approach where the city can
certainly nestle right in the middle and be very helpful. Thank you.
That was great. That was only four minutes.
All right. So we're gonna open up for discussion now to talk about
anything, anything, any one of the topics that you had, how it relates to
the work that you do, um If you have questions, um this would be the time
to ask. So anybody want to start out?
Ok, I'm gonna point Josh in the back. Josh. So Melissa talked about this
issue about codes and both codes in terms of design and codes in terms of
materials and that type of thing. And I know we've done some of that for
the urban downtown urban form plan. But how do we go about um addressing
this issue of codes and form and materials at the development review level
? Sure. Uh you know, one of the strategies we've employed is there's a
sustainability bonus section in the in the at the end of the downtown code
that provides a a point system to allow a project to get more height, more
lot coverage. And so I think that we can continue to utilize that as
incentives to provide flexibility. I think Karen did a great job talking
about how do we sell this from a numbers standpoint? Well, providing
regulatory flexibility translates to to to numbers for on a development
project. I think if we could incorporate those into quotes to say, if you
chose this route or these strategies, we can give you flexibility in these
development standard areas. That could certainly be one strategy and I
think that, that that would be helpful for us if in a collaboration, to
tell us what would be those areas to focus on, what, what would be those
adjustments, how much open space should be, what would be that threshold
to say if you provide this much open space, you get this much bonus. Uh
and it would have this much impact on thermal comfort and the urban heat
island. Uh I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to have those
discussions to make some modifications uh to, to our codes in that regard.
Ok, great. Thanks
somebody else.
Oh, good. Yeah,
thank you from uh um I'm from the Office of Homeland Security Emergency
Management. And I think there's some opportunities for us in terms of the
public engagement piece and prep and preparedness and resilience is with
some of those scenarios as well as with the um public engagement piece in
terms of the resilience plan. I heard them say about a resilience plan and
there's some opportunity because we're starting that piece, that component
in our office in terms of going out into the communities with the public
engagement piece. OK, thanks, Josh. Great. Yeah, you, you can have the
next five minutes. Josh, if you want another thing, I, I think if we're
looking at, at ways to collaborate, that cities are, are constantly in
competition, I think probably the most high profile example of that is
that the race for Amazon right now. Right. Well, uh part of what might be
helpful is to think about again, I'll, I'll build on what Karen had said.
What could we point to, to say that what other cities have done? And I,
as part of research, I don't know if I, one thing I didn't see, have there
been some success stories that we could point to, to say, look, City X did
this and look what the the economic benefit or look what the social
benefit was. I think those would be great things to add to this narrative
in this discussion so that as as policy implemented, implement, we can
have discussions with our policy making body about what other cities have
done and how that's been successful. So II I, I'd keep that in mind as we
continue this collaboration. OK. That's a good thing for us to know is
that maybe we could do some exploratory research on what the people doing.
OK. Any other comments, discussions, ideas,
streets, the streets here today, some someone from streets, I saw someone
earlier streets, streets. Are we, what are we doing in terms of paving
materials? Uh the mix you're using. You know, one of the interesting
things is we had a session in Flagstaff about a year ago where we
discussed with Flagstaff, the impacts of climate increased heat. And one
of the things that came out of the discussion was is the mix they use
wasn't gonna work when temperatures got higher. So are we, we thinking
about those things? Anybody, somebody,
I'm sorry? Oh, he left, sorry. Ok. Go ahead. Yes. Good
nine.
Working with EPA A SU and region nine to talk about paving materials and
roofing materials. So we've had that discussion going just a couple of
months. So we are exploring those activities. Cool, cool. All right. What
else? Any other thoughts?
Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. We'll do that one and then we'll do Mark. Look, I
have to queue people up now. This is great closer. So, yeah, I think the
um the conversation around the tradeoffs with water is super important. Um
I've heard uh you know, in the rhetoric like that, that grass can be cool
and, and of course, that's, that can be true. But, but we should be
thinking really careful about carefully about our vegetation choices. Um
And what we're encouraging there, I think that the nature Conservancy has
a big role to play and in that conversation around soil health and, and
the tradeoffs between cooling and, and with vegetation and what type of
vegetation is appropriate. Um There's a lot of folks in this room, Richard
Adkins that, that are involved in and um, you know, the tree work, but I
think that we, you know, shrubs and, and discussion around grass is
important also.
Ok. That's a good one.
Mark.
I think one of the cross cutting things, it's kind of interesting is the
as we talked about the topic of vulnerability assessment and uh many of
these research, they all ta exposed a particular vulnerability, uh both
the heat, both in a sense of extreme events as well as ongoing stressors
and then air quality and what the impacts of vulnerable populations on
those and, and uh the benefits of providing cool corridors and shade path
and cooling centers. And, and uh really, I think to coalesce some of this
into a, a real vulnerability assessment of where some of those strong
overlaps would be. I think it's a really important initiative that uh we
kinda need to bring forward. We've done various forms of vulnerability
assessments, but I think that there really could be a one that coalesces
many of these.
Thanks. Mark any other comments, Richard, do you wanna add anything you
got picked out? You got picked out over here. So you need to say something
, don't you?
Um from what I'm getting out of a lot of this is the more of the
combination of just shade, both maybe environmental or natural and air
quality. I think the combination of those two need to be looked at more
closely as we look forward and um move forward with more scenarios in some
of this work. You know, one of the things I know that you struggle with
this is you, we want to increase the tree coverage we have. But then, you
know, Karen says we don't have a lot of money to be doing that. And so
this concept of prioritizing what you're doing to focus on comfort. It
sounds like a good strategy. It's a way for you to try to do the best you
can with the funds you have and have the best impact, right? And it comes
back to species choice and intelligent design on the placement of that
which has been touched upon all morning.
Any other thoughts about this prioritization issue? Anybody who want to
contribute to that?
Oh Halley, go ahead.
I mean, this is just a note on on kind of the a su side of of our research.
And I mean, it seems to me if, if we've captured a good profile of what
we're doing here, um perhaps a little bit more work on the institutional
and governance side of things in terms of how do you, what kind of are the
real constraints on decision making in the agencies? How is your
coordinations happening? What are those uh barriers or obstacles to uh
doing the kind of integrated and vulnerability assessment or tackling some
of these issues? I think that focusing on incentive structures at
different levels, whether that's what households face or what different
agencies face um really can provide some openings to see what are some,
not just what are the kind of optimal opportunities, but where are the
really pragmatic choices uh given what the decision context is and perhaps
that's something that uh we could also be collaborating with um to try and
facilitate a conversation about some of those real issues uh that are in
the agency context rather than just out in the Phoenix environment.
So this idea of collaboration between A Su and Phoenix is not something
that's new. I mean, in the 20 years, I worked at city of Phoenix and
planning and then water. There were occasions where on this heat issue
that there was collaboration between the city and A SU. I know we did that
with the airport. Some of the design, the airport was done that when we
did the urban downtown urban floor plan, there was collaboration. So
there's been collaboration, but what is different is that was kind of
haphazard. You know, as Susan pointed out, it's often difficult to figure
out who to talk to at a su at the city manager's direction. Mark and Karen
approached a su and said, look, we've been doing this for a long time.
We've done a lot of things, you've done a lot of things we need to make
this more formal and probably be more aggressive of what we're doing if
we're going to try to address the issue. And so we formed this partnership
between A SU and the city and the A SU is committed to this partnership.
Um Melissa has been sort of designated as sort of the coordinator. She
does not sure she's liking that, but she's been designated as the
coordinator and she's been working with different staff. Um, President
Crowe has allocated some funds to the project to help us with the
logistics as we're moving forward. So we're committed to that. And Crowe
has made on several occasions statements saying we're committed to working
with the city of Phoenix on this heat issue. As Melissa pointed out, we
already have some projects going on the city side. Um They formed a
steering committee, some of you in the room are on that steering committee.
Um But the steering committee is trying to identify where we can
specifically make connections between A S US research and a su faculty and
staff um to work on ongoing and on future projects. And so the projects
Melissa talked about is we're actually bringing faculty and staff from a
su to work with the staff at the City of Phoenix while they're in the
design stages on projects to try to incorporate some of the concepts we
talked about today in that. And so we're looking for more projects. It's
one of the reasons why we're reaching out today with you to trying to
broaden, we've had a meeting with the directors, a similar meeting, a
little bit shorter than this but somewhat similar um with the directors of
departments. And we're now we're reaching out to you. So we're really
interested in working with you and, and sometimes that it's hard for um
the staff with everything they have to do to say, oh no, that's I have to
do this as well, but we're trying to provide to you some assistance to
help you be able to do that. And so if you think there's any relationship
at all between the work you're doing and these concepts of urban heat and
extreme heat and comfort and trying to increase the comfort of the
constituents and your customers here at Phoenix, then please fill out on
these forms, what you're doing and what you, what your contact your
information. So we can reach out to you or you can contact Mark or Karen
or Jennifer and say, look, I'm interested in this. So we're looking for
opportunities to try to do that. Uh Chuck emphasized earlier today that um
this is just not, you know, some exercise that a SU wants to do because we
want to engage with the community more. This is a fairly critical issue
for the region and it's not just Phoenix, it's other cities and we hope to
be able to, to use Phoenix as an example to reach out to other cities. But
uh if temperatures increase, whether you believe in climate change or not
, I mean, everybody, if you've been here a while, you know, the nighttime
temperatures are hiding, but if they get even higher, it's gonna become
harder and harder to live here. And we're, we're probably we can do some
things to try to mitigate the urban heat island. I mean, what we do to
mitigate the global heat is, is another matter but we can do things to
make it more comfortable for people to live here so that it is still
livable here. Um And we, we can try to sur uh survive and try to adapt to
that climate change. So it's important for this connection. We, we did, we
lose Karen. Oh, I'm sorry. So I'm gonna do Karen. She's gonna close, sorry
, sorry. It was. So you were like filibustering because you didn't know
where it was. Uh OK. Well, um I, I think this has been really interesting
and fun. It's kind of like
turned it off. Hello? No.
No. Yes. No. Ok. Ok. So, um, I don't know how many, I mean, there's a lot
of uh a lot of a su folks here who may never have heard about our
marketing campaign here at the city of Phoenix and it's called Phoenix is
Hot. Have you heard that uh Phoenix is hot and, and you believe it or not
? And from heat researchers perspective, perhaps you think why on earth
would that be our marketing strategy, our, our marketing campaign? But
that it is, that is our, that is our campaign. Phoenix is hot. Phoenix is
a place where things are happening and, and so, yeah, I, I looked at that
in my first, my first reaction was, oh, no, but um I, I, I've come to look
at it as a very positive thing for, for a couple of reasons. Uh Of course
, it's hot. It's a desert, of course, it's hot. Uh But we know having,
having lived here and thrived here and grown here that uh of course, it's
a desert. Water is scarce. But here in Phoenix, we know water. We're smart
about water. We've managed to thrive and grow and be a world leader in
managing our water resources or scarce water resources. And so we're smart
about water. We're, we're, we're, we're good at that. So Phoenix is hot.
We're, we want to be just as good at heat as we are at water. Uh We would
like to lead the world um in terms of adaptation and management of the
heat in which we live and of course, that's increasing uh as we know, and
it is unfortunately going to impact uh parts of our community more than
others. And that's a big, big challenge for our time. Um That is very
important to city management. My boss at Zerka, our city manager is, is
very, very engaged and, and, and feels the urgency of this issue and, and
has emphasized that to me and, and mark and, and others on our team that
we need to, we need to work together and figure something out because it
is uh it increasing urban heat threatens our long term economic viability
if we don't handle it correctly. And it also very much impacts the quality
of life of our most vulnerable residents. So we need to, we need to be
smart about it and we need to be proactive about it. So what we're doing
today and I'm, I'm just so thrilled that that so many city staff were able
to be here um is expose all of our city people to all the wonderful work
that A SU is doing. Um get an understanding of what that is and how it
might help us help us in the city to do our work smarter. The other thing
though that we want to do here is for a su to understand better what we do.
Um So that you can kind of think about that and incorporate that into the
work that you're doing. So, you know, the forms that are on the table uh
really encourage you to, to think about things you wanna know more about
stuff you didn't hear about is there, there's just no research happening
on this issue that I deal with every day. Well, write it down, please let
us know. Um so that we can, we can work together to maximize the benefit
of this really important partnership. Um
It's, it's, it's getting late and I'm not gonna filibuster anymore, but I
do want to say this. I I am so grateful for the partnership. The
leadership, of course, Doctor Crowe has emphasized this and the importance
of this. Our mayor uh Mayor Stanton has, has very much emphasized the
importance of this work. So I, I think leadership uh for, for helping us
prioritize this. I also really wanna thank Chuck and Melissa and Ray and
David for coming to many meetings with, with us here at the city to talk
about how to best approach this partnership. And I think we're doing,
we're doing a pretty good job as is evidenced today. I very much want to
thank all the faculty who came out uh to present to us today. I wanna
thank our guests in the audience from the Nature Conservancy and Vital
health um partnering in many ways uh to further further our, our efforts
here. Uh So, thanks. Uh It's been great and please, let's thank our, our A
su friends.
I think, I think that's it. Right. Right. OK. Uh If you haven't already
take a look at the placards over here against the windows, our sustainable
Home design competition is underway and if you have name tags, please drop
them off. Uh You can vote on the best design at sustainable Home Design
competition.com. Please do. Thank you.