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.
Luckily, cities are also where ambitious leaders are stepping up to think creatively on how they can keep their communities cool. Cities around the world are taking steps to counter urban heat and its effects, using innovative solutions and approaches to reduce ambient temperatures and serve cooling needs in sustainable and efficient ways.
Innovative, locally tailored and community centered approaches are a key part of this puzzle. Cities need to put in place supportive policy and regulatory environment to enable the right ecosystem for innovation and to scale up access to sustainable urban cooling practices.
In this session, policy makers and international expert outlined how cities around the world are leveraging innovative approaches to deliver on urban cooling, spanning from policy, technology and financial tools to scale up access to sustainable urban cooling practices. The event’s summary and recording are forthcoming.