CEE Seminar - Identifying and Solutions to Urban Heat Stress and Climate Justice with Satellite Remote Sensing and Multi-Modelling Approaches

In the U.S., people of color and low-income individuals disproportionately live in areas with potential for higher heat exposure. Measuring heat exposure in urban areas is important for protecting and improving human health and creating equitable outcomes. Accurate and timely measurements are key for both micro-level policy decisions (e.g., where to undertake heat mitigation investments) and macro-level policy analysis (e.g., reducing disparities in exposure by race and income). Unfortunately, comprehensive and scale-relevant measurements of individual heat stress have proven elusive within cities. To begin to understand historical climate injustices, where marginalized communities bear a disproportionate exposure and vulnerability to climate change impacts, a key challenge is to characterize vulnerability and risk of health disparities arising from climate impacts (including heat stress) at the community scale. Developing higher resolution, more relevant metrics would provide multiple benefits to understanding health impacts, the extent of heat-related environmental and climate disparities, and the impact of heat mitigation measures. In this talk, I'll discuss our work integrating multiple modelling approaches and data sources to develop higher resolution human-centric measures of heat stress and how this data can inform heat mitigation and adaptation responses.