Climate Point: U.S. cities are largely unprepared for rising temperatures

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Erin Rode in Palm Springs, California.

Here in the Southern California desert, highs in the triple digits are already common for half the year, and daily average high temperatures are expected to go up by 8 to 14 degrees by the end of the century, as climate change pushes temperatures upward. Local cities are looking into how they can plan for heat, such as building shade structures, planting trees, and improving awareness of extreme heat, as I reported for The Desert Sun. 

But many cities are still in the early stages of preparing for rising temperatures and increase in extreme heat days. A recent analysis of municipal planning documents from 50 large U.S. cities found that 78% of climate action plans mentioned heat as a problem, but few included strategies to address it. 

“Just a couple of years ago, very few cities were talking about preparing for rising temperatures, so it’s an important step that heat is becoming a larger part of the conversation,” said V. Kelly Turner, lead author of the study and co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. “But without concrete steps to protect residents, cities are lagging behind the problem.”  

Some large cities, like Phoenix and Los Angeles, are taking steps by hiring "heat officers" to guide city responses to extreme heat. Phoenix announced its first heat officer last year, who will lead the nation's first publicly funded office of heat response and mitigation, as The Arizona Republic reported at the time. In Los Angeles, the city's first chief heat officer started this summer, and will focus on coordinating the city's response to extreme heat across multiple city agencies, as Heidi de Marco reported for Kaiser Health News. 

With rising temperatures across the U.S., even cities that haven't traditionally experienced hot summers are now planning for heat. After last year's deadly heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, local officials say they're using the unprecedented event to prepare for this summer, Ariel Wittenberg reports for E&E News. More than 160 people died from the heat in Oregon and Washington last June, with many dying because they stayed in spaces without air conditioning or another way to cool down.

Many buildings in the region don't have air conditioning, including the municipal buildings that could be used for cool centers. Officials are now working with private businesses and neighboring churches to establish places where residents can go to cool off, and are increasing their messaging around heat, Wittenberg reports. 

Here are some other stories of interest this week.

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