Collaboration and Extreme Heat: Exploring Local Policy to Extreme Heat Events

• In Event: Crisis and Disaster: Public Policies for Response, Resilience, and Transformation

Abstract

The health risks from climate change are profound. Increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are linked to a range of challenges including droughts, flooding, sea level rise, poor air quality, more frequent and extreme weather events, and extreme heat. Among these negative consequences, extreme heat exposure remains particularly concerning. In the United States, extreme heat events have already killed more people that all other natural disasters combined. In many urban areas, dense concentrations of buildings and pavement combine with increasing temperatures to create an urban heat island. Urban heat islands are significantly hotter areas because the density of buildings and pavement absorb and emit more of the sun’s heat compared to trees, vegetation, and water bodies. Racial and ethnic residential segregation in the United States has shaped the growth and development of urban areas, resulting in historically segregated communities having a much higher density of buildings, more paved surfaces, and less vegetation or green space. This in turn leads to substantially higher heat-related vulnerability in these areas. In 2024, the National Integrated Heat Health Information System and the Interagency Working Group on Extreme Heat released a multi-year national heat strategy highlighting the critical importance of widespread partnerships to address extreme heat and health equity. 

Subnational policy efforts remain critical in this area, but there is limited research detailing what factors shape the development of heat related governance across a range of localities. Are local policies responding to extreme heat considering vulnerability and heath equity? Less is known about the ways in which localities rely on cross sector collaboration to address the health consequences of extreme heat. This paper relies on a mixed methods approach to explore what factors are associated with the development of urban heat initiatives. The paper also examines the extent of cross sectoral collaboration in local policies to address the health risks from extreme heat events. The study leverages 10-years of data (2014-2024) from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) which tracks urban energy policy in 100 of the largest cities in the United States, including policies that address urban heat islands. This policy data has been merged with a range of existing city and state level data allowing for a pooled cross-sectional time series analysis exploring the determinants of adoption of local heat policy. In addition, the study examines twenty cities in more detail to better understand the dimensions of cross sectoral collaboration to address extreme heat events. The guiding principles detailed in the National Heat Strategy form the basis of a coding framework to characterize the range of collaborative governance that could underpin local heat policy. Systematic coding of heat mitigation plans enables a deeper understanding of the ways urban areas are partnering with diverse entities to implement and evaluate transformative policy solutions to extreme heat.

Authors

• Dorothy M. Daley, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author

• Margaret Swenson, University of Wyoming
  Non-Presenting Co-Author