Cities worldwide face growing heat risks but still mostly lack comprehensive and coordinated efforts to address heat hazards. Emerging urban heat governance systems should integrate disciplines and sectors to holistically and equitably mitigate and manage heat through goals, data, action, evaluation, and public participation across different governance instruments and jurisdictional scales.
Dr. Radhika Khosla, associate professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, research director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, and the Principle Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country program on the future of cooling, recently spoke with One Earth about challenges facing cities in a warming world and potential solutions. The views expressed by Shikha Bhasin are hers only and not necessarily those of the University of Oxford.
Countries in the tropics, and populations disadvantaged based on gender, ethnicity, and caste, are more vulnerable to extreme heat. Present-day conditions—livelihoods, access to shade, and housing—mediate capacities to adapt. Heat adaptation actions must engage with unequal heat risk by targeting vulnerable populations and recognizing unequal access to cooling.
Shikha Bhasin, senior advisor at Cool Coalition, United Nations Environment Programme, recently spoke with One Earth about building inclusive cooling capacity for a heat-resilient world. The views expressed by Shikha Bhasin are hers only and not necessarily those of the UNEP.
In this warming world, excessive heat is burning cities from the south to the north. Cooling technologies have been available for decades, but many, like air conditioners, can themselves be a source of heat and emissions that exacerbate local heat island effects and contribute to climate change. Furthermore, cooling solutions are often out of reach for the most vulnerable people. This Voices asks: what is the path to sustainable cooling technologies for all?
The complex processing of energy and matter by organisms that live in an ecosystem, known as ecosystem metabolism, determines the carbon sink strength of ecosystems and is fundamental to climate change mitigation strategies. To optimize the strategies, the response of ecosystem metabolism, here quantified as net ecosystem exchange (NEE), to global warming was assessed. Using numerous NEE and meteorological measurements from highly diverse ecosystems around the world, it is shown that NEE rapidly increases with increasing temperature, being predictable by a simple modified Arrhenius equation. Despite a high intra-annual NEE variation, the mean NEE over a few years approached zero at all sites. The results suggest that ecosystem metabolism is generally resilient to warming, which is explained by ecosystem metabolism following light and temperature interactions at the Earth’s surface. However, even if ecosystems might maintain their functioning without climate change mitigation actions, rapid biodiversity changes are likely under global warming.
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