By Vivek Shandas
Shandas, who has a doctorate in urban design and planning, is a professor at Portland State University and is the founding director of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab. He lives in Portland.
While I was beginning my day on June 28 in my air-conditioned bedroom, almost 1,000 people – dozens of whom resided just a few miles from my Northeast Portland home – died of heat-related illness during the unprecedented heat wave that moved through Oregon, Washington and Canada. Heat, according to the World Health Organization, is a deadly killer, taking over 200,000 lives since 2000 – more than any other natural disaster. With 115 people dying in Oregon alone, we witnessed firsthand the far-reaching implications of heat’s lethal nature. Perhaps this will finally be a wake-up call.
Even with knowledge about the deadly effects of heat, and weather forecasts giving us a week or more warning, we collectively did little to prepare. What would we have done if we knew that an earthquake – –the “Big One” – was two weeks away? How about a tsunami? Or a once in a thousand-year flood? The world is watching while we attempt to pick up the pieces after the recent heat event that broke records and climate models. Though how can we prepare?
As a university professor and consultant, I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades studying about and preparing communities for heat waves and have seen promising practices that might help us prepare for hotter summers. While novel applications for adapting modern society to the increasing intensity and frequency of heat waves are still only emerging, the local implementation of such programs will require science, dialogue and centering historically marginalized communities, who face the gravest impacts.
We need to begin learning from places that are already adapting to longer and more intense heat waves. Consider for example, Western Europe, where over 70,000 people died after a 2003 heat wave. While very different socially, culturally, and historically than Oregon, communities across the region are using the “power of the pen” to create heat response plans. What would a statewide, regional, or municipal heat response wave plan look like? How might we begin with identifying the assets in our communities, and develop a coordinated response when temperatures reach threshold levels? Certainly, one goal would be to prepare residents, farmworkers, outdoor day-laborers, employers, public health staff and others for actions that can reduce the impacts. For example, such plans would enable public health agencies to reach out to potentially vulnerable populations about finding cooling options, requiring employers to halt outdoor work at 100-degrees Fahrenheit, and expanding the number of temporary shelters for those living without homes.
We should establish “resilience hubs” or “climate kiosks” within neighborhoods where people can find timely, easy-to-understand weather-specific resources about local cooling centers in multiple languages. Such hubs are known to increase knowledge about and interactions with our neighbors which not only promotes mental health and social well-being, but also offers a powerful antidote to social isolation. As the weather become more unpredictable, a direct result of climate change, we’ll need to improve communications across diverse parts of our communities.
Planning agencies should improve the electrical grid, including “micro-grids” as we continue accelerating the adoption of air conditioning in our region. With a rapidly growing appetite for power-hungry air conditioning in our Pacific Northwest buildings, our energy grid will likely face rolling “brown-outs” or black outs, increasing the vulnerability of people, business, and life-saving services. Grid outages are commonplace around the world. Having redundant systems that directly link energy producers with consumers though local renewable power and building-level battery storage can help avert cascading failures of our electrical systems, eradicating energy poverty, and enhancing grid security and resiliency.
Heat is also a public health disaster that is moderated by the quality of housing that we inhabit. If we can ensure that people who currently don’t have houses or are temporarily housed – farmworkers, day laborers, houseless people – have heat-safe refuges during extreme temperatures, then we’ll need to think about the codes, regulations, and standards that are enforced across different sectors. Simple options such as painting white roofs, capturing winter rainwater for use in the summer, weatherizing homes, and providing access to renewably sourced air-conditioned spaces can offer safe housing in the short term. Over the longer term, we’ll need to incorporate more green infrastructure, such as trees on both public and private land, neighborhood green spaces, building permit requirements that mandate a no-net-increase in neighborhood temperatures, and architectural designs that enable wind to move freely through neighborhoods.
With our federal government’s lack of recognition that heat waves are a natural disaster, much of this work will fall upon local planning, environmental, and public health agencies. We can be better prepared for the next heat wave, but only if our communities recognize that the time to act is now.
Share your opinion
Submit your essay of 500-600 words on a highly topical issue or a theme of particular relevance to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and the Portland area to commentary@oregonian.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.
"Opinion" - Google News
July 25, 2021 at 08:01PM
https://ift.tt/3iKqofG
Opinion: A wake-up call to prepare our communities for the next heat wave - OregonLive
"Opinion" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FkSo6m
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment