Larry Glass, NEC Board President
Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director
Urban Heat Island
Climate migration is starting to become a factor that northwest California is reckoning with. As our climate begins to destabilize, many parts of California are becoming dangerous to live in, whether from floods, fires or just overwhelmingly hot weather intensified by the effect of urban heat islands. The urban heat island effect is exactly what it sounds like; cities are often significantly hotter than the surrounding areas primarily due to quintessential “city” features, like concrete and asphalt, which absorb more sunlight and radiate heat more than natural landscapes. At night, the difference is often more pronounced as the heat stored in urban infrastructure is released, keeping the temperature higher than in areas with more vegetation. The result is often temperatures that are dangerous to human health.
For discussion’s sake, let’s take a city like Sacramento where the afternoon temperature can be in the triple digits. Then add 10 degrees to that from the heat island effect and you get a heat index temperature which can make it unlivable; unless you have air conditioning your health and safety could be in jeopardy. One solution that some people are being forced to pursue is to move away to an area like the North Coast of California where the ocean moderates the temperature. It is certainly understandable and it’s actually the reason some of us moved here as well.
One mitigating solution (in addition to drastically changing the way that we live on the planet and getting off of our fossil fuel addiction) is instead of evacuating the cities, we work to cool them down. Luckily, there are measures cities can take to temper the urban heat island effect.
Cities can preserve green space and plant more trees, especially on paved streets, and set up green roofs to provide shade and reduce the temperature on rooftops. They can also use reflective or permeable materials on rooftops to help reduce surface temperatures. One way this is measured is called the albedo effect; light-colored surfaces return a large part of the sun’s rays back to the atmosphere (high albedo); dark surfaces absorb the rays from the sun (low albedo).
These changes to the built environment can help cool cities, but until we can stop the rise in global temperatures, city dwellers will continue to face hotter and hotter conditions. Like so many of the effects of climate change, urban heat islands have an outsized effect on those who can’t afford to migrate and those who live on the streets. In the recent heat wave in Phoenix, half of those who died of heat-related causes were unhoused; two-thirds were over the age of 50.
So even though many of us live on the cool North Coast, we can’t stay in denial and say that this doesn’t affect us, because it will eventually. We need to prepare for more folks moving to this wonderful place that we call home, including by making sure that there is housing for all, especially the most vulnerable. We already struggle to house all of our residents here and, just like climate change impacts, the lack of housing affects low-income people the most. Wealthy people may struggle to find exactly the housing they want, but they don’t struggle to find housing. If we don’t plan for and prioritize affordable housing, we may all find ourselves priced out of the North Coast.
Desired Future Conditions
Here at the NEC we like to practice imagining what the future could be like; not just the bleak future that will arise if we carry on with business as usual, but our ideal future. What do we want the world to be like in 50 or 100 years? It’s a useful exercise to envision what we should be working on in this moment to bring about that desired future, to lay out the path of possible actions that can get us where we want to be. The difficult part of this exercise is suspending our disbelief and not letting our desires be limited by the constraints of bureaucracy or what we think is “possible.”
Now, this practice is directly applicable in our work engaging with the update to the Northwest Forest Plan. As reported in last month’s EcoNews, the US Forest Service is working on modernizing landscape management across the national forests within the Northwest Forest Plan area (Washington, Oregon and Northern California). One of the first steps will be developing a statement of “Desired Future Conditions.” This is a departure from simply responding to the current, undesirable conditions. So what do you think our national forests should look like in 10, 20, or 30 years? What are the desired future conditions of our public lands?
The main condition that we’d like to see in our national forests is a diversity of species. Restoring conditions that support all of the species in a thriving ecosystem is vital for the future of our forests. An important step in that direction is retaining existing canopy cover and enhancing new canopy cover. This can be achieved in different ways, from strategic and limited logging to promote growth, to prescribed burns which limit fuel loading and create favorable conditions for certain plants. We would also like to see more public lands managed by Indigenous stewards, which can be achieved through management agreements, Landback and funding. This is just the beginning of our list of desired future conditions. What are yours?