Cities are the places where humanity’s greatest challenges impact the most people. This is increasingly the case for climate change: the world’s cities are heating up at twice the global average rate due to urban heat island effect. By 2100, cities across the world could warm as much as 4.4°C on average. Without intervention, this rising heat will have catastrophic impacts on the health, comfort and resilience of all urban communities.
To counter urban heat and its effects, cities need to urgently adopt strategies to reduce heat at urban scale and cooling needs in buildings, serve cooling needs in sustainable and efficient ways. This session will showcase tools and solutions cities can use to tackle urban heat in sustainable and comprehensive ways, to protect the people and the planet alike.
At this COP26 event, the UNEP-led Cool Coalition, the Clean Cooling Collaborative, RMI, Mission Innovation and the Global Covenant of Mayors launched Beating the Heat: A Sustainable Cooling Handbook for Cities, a new tool that provides actionable guidance for cities to organize and prioritize action towards sustainable and equitable urban cooling. Watch the press conference here.
