URBAN CLIMATE & HEAT IN THE emerald corridor
One of the more profound and insidious – yet largely misunderstood – disasters to affect humans and the built environment is urban heat. Exposure to heat claims more lives than all other natural disasters combined, yet fatalities to humans and impacts on infrastructure are largely preventable. While the radiative heating of urban infrastructure from heat waves directly impacts communities, the latter are also indirectly affected through the drying of surrounding lands and increasing likelihood of devastating wildfire smoke. Arguably, communities that are less prepared will face greater impacts from heat waves, and those that have the least access to cooling resources will encounter the greatest fatalities. Indeed, as the demographic profiles of cities change, strategies aimed at improving urban resilience to natural disasters will need to recognize how different cultures and socioeconomic populations perceive, design, and are affected by infrastructure. Ameliorative strategies will also need to consider the specific geographic contexts and bioclimates.
The Urban Climate and Heat in the Emerald Corridor (U-CHEC) network consists of three cities - Tacoma (WA), Surrey (BC), and Portland (OR) - and aims to conceptualize and analyze mitigation options for reducing impacts from future urban heat events. The vision of U-CHEC is to build capacity among decision-makers to address the impacts of urban heat on infrastructure, communities, and ecosystems. We will do so by addressing three strategic goals:
(1) Build a network of urban institutions, students, and faculty researchers to explore resilience of cities to climate change-driven extreme events;
(2) Work with practitioners and decision makers to co-produce knowledge that facilitates data-driven visioning, and ultimately transitions to a sustainable future for urban infrastructure, communities, and regional ecosystems; and
(3) Continuously assess the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of our approach to enable learning and adjustment in response to evaluative feedback.
We aim to engage practitioners in these three Pacific Northwest cities over the course of one year in a systematic, five-step approach to build local capacity and resiliency to climate change. Our three partner cities all have rich data about infrastructure, ecosystems, and people; support active research and planning programs; are situated in similar climate zones, so can share relevant practices. Exploring infrastructure and urban systems with the SETS framework will transform understanding of the coupling of social, ecological, and technological dynamics, and barriers and opportunities around urban sustainability transitions. The SETS framework is novel in its integration of intellectual domains (ecological-biophysical, social-behavioral, and technological-engineering), each with its own disciplines, logic, and feedback that do not automatically translate from one domain to the other. Our work will develop means of supporting decision-makers in understanding dynamics and feedbacks of these systems, as well as unintended consequences of interactions among these domains of activity.
Special thanks to our partner:
The Urban Climate and Heat in the Emerald Corridor (U-CHEC) network consists of three cities - Tacoma (WA), Surrey (BC), and Portland (OR) - and aims to conceptualize and analyze mitigation options for reducing impacts from future urban heat events. The vision of U-CHEC is to build capacity among decision-makers to address the impacts of urban heat on infrastructure, communities, and ecosystems. We will do so by addressing three strategic goals:
(1) Build a network of urban institutions, students, and faculty researchers to explore resilience of cities to climate change-driven extreme events;
(2) Work with practitioners and decision makers to co-produce knowledge that facilitates data-driven visioning, and ultimately transitions to a sustainable future for urban infrastructure, communities, and regional ecosystems; and
(3) Continuously assess the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of our approach to enable learning and adjustment in response to evaluative feedback.
We aim to engage practitioners in these three Pacific Northwest cities over the course of one year in a systematic, five-step approach to build local capacity and resiliency to climate change. Our three partner cities all have rich data about infrastructure, ecosystems, and people; support active research and planning programs; are situated in similar climate zones, so can share relevant practices. Exploring infrastructure and urban systems with the SETS framework will transform understanding of the coupling of social, ecological, and technological dynamics, and barriers and opportunities around urban sustainability transitions. The SETS framework is novel in its integration of intellectual domains (ecological-biophysical, social-behavioral, and technological-engineering), each with its own disciplines, logic, and feedback that do not automatically translate from one domain to the other. Our work will develop means of supporting decision-makers in understanding dynamics and feedbacks of these systems, as well as unintended consequences of interactions among these domains of activity.
Special thanks to our partner:
