Dive Brief:
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A new data platform from the World Resources Institute maps urban heat risk block by block and models which cooling solutions — such as trees, shade structures or cool roofs — could have the biggest impact.
- Cool Cities Lab, co-designed with city decision-makers and built on accessible open data, launched in March in more than 20 cities worldwide, including Boston and Atlanta.
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WRI has built data sets that allow it to expand the tool’s reach to “any city in the world,” said Eric Mackres, senior manager, data and tools for WRI’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. “This is an attempt to democratize this information, make it more available to many more places.”
Dive Insight:
The U.S. experienced the hottest March on record this year, and meteorologists are predicting a super-sized El Niño climate pattern will increase temperatures worldwide in the coming months.
“Extreme heat is a severe and growing problem,” Mackres said. “It’s a silent disaster, but most years it’s actually the largest environmental disaster in terms of impacts on people’s lives.”
The way cities are built can concentrate heat into urban heat islands. This and the concentration of people into those areas increases the risks from extreme heat, Mackres said, “but we also know that how cities are built can be part of the solution.”
With Cool Cities Lab, city officials can facilitate stakeholder discussions using data and visualizations, identify high-priority areas for action and design targeted interventions with measurable results. Officials can use the platform to estimate the cooling potential of heat-resilience interventions like trees, cool roofs and shade structures. It also offers tools for creating maps and visualizations for grant proposals and documents that can inform evidence-based policies and regulations.
In Atlanta, WRI worked with a City Council member and the Smart Surfaces Coalition to develop modeling that led to a new cool roof ordinance. The ordinance requires all new and replacement roofs to use high-reflectance materials, Mackres said.
“This resolution is not just about roofs; it’s about resilience,” Atlanta City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the ordinance, said in a statement. “It’s about protecting health, reducing energy burdens, and standing up for communities that have been overlooked for far too long. Atlanta is not just talking about climate justice; we’re delivering it.”
Mackres said Cool Cities Lab data was “critical in actually answering the questions of [Atlanta] council members and being able to allay any concerns that these are proven solutions” as the ordinance was debated.
In the Boston area, WRI is developing cool roof education materials and pilot projects with the region’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council, Mackres said.
“There’s no one way to measure heat risk or one way to measure heat hazard,” Mackres said. Cool Cities Lab data innovations make it easier for cities to access “more holistic measurements of heat hazards,” including air temperature, land surface temperature, humidity and universal thermal comfort. Cities can then select the most appropriate solutions “to the nature of the problem and the differences in how people experience heat.”
“In the past, a lot of this kind of modeling was only available to cities that had a budget where they could hire a consultant to do this for them and build something from scratch,” Mackres said. With Cool Cities Lab, “all of this is open source, so others can take this and adapt it for their needs.”
