Texas Trees launches a five-year plan to make South Dallas more green

Medellín, Colombia, is combating the urban heat island effect by creating green corridors across the city. Over 2.5 million plants and trees were carefully selected to maximize impact and planted on buildings and along roads and waterways.

Bulk-purchase "group-buy" programs for heat pumps have achieved 15-30% cost savings for participants, and on Gabriola Island, over 1,000 units have been installed, making carbon-free heating and cooling more accessible.

Vienna’s cool streets provide a safe outdoor space to escape the heat in the summer. The city used a heat map and population data to select streets with high concentrations of residents who are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, like children and the elderly. At the selected locations, traffic was limited and asphalt was covered with turf, benches, mist machines, and water fountains. When the city challenged the project, a citizen’s initiative in the Ottakring district worked with the local council to keep one cool street open last summer, saving a public safe outdoor space.

Researchers of the Cooling Singapore project are using huge amounts of data to build a detailed digital twin of the city that they can use to test how effective new methods of combatting extreme heat would be. It's a digital representation of Singapore that makes predictions based on data like traffic, weather, electricity demand, and where green spaces are.

The Office of Heat Response and Mitigation works to address the urban heat effect caused by intense summer temperatures. The Office has worked on several practices like coating streets and surfaces in light-colored, water-based asphalt treatments that reflect sunlight and absorb less heat than standard pavement. So far, 100 miles of residential roads have been covered in the treatment and roads with the treatment have an average surface temperature that is 10.5 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit lower than traditional asphalt.

Although residents turn up their air conditioners, Louisville heat is increasing the city’s death rate by 39 people every year. The city mayor launched a tree commission for planting more trees and since 2011 has planted over 12,000 trees. The canopies from the tree offer cooling shade and bring down the temperature of the city as a whole. The response also includes the installation of green roofs and in-depth research on urban heat islands.

The Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona is a key part of the city’s growing climate shelter network, which has expanded from 70 locations in 2020 to 368 last summer. The climate centers are integrated into the city’s public infrastructure — libraries, parks, museums, etc. — and have expanded to the point where 98% of the population is within a 10-minute walk from a shelter.

A cooperative in Switzerland is building sustainable apartments using recycled materials and green building practices to create carbon-neutral communal living spaces. These “cluster apartments” cut down on living space per person and save energy.

A partnership between local nonprofit Climate Resolve and roofing and waterproofing manufacturer GAF covered 700,000 square feet of dark asphalt surfaces with a solar-reflective coating to help keep residents cool in the summer. Research found that during an extreme heat event, the area with the pavement coating saw ambient temperatures 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than an adjacent neighborhood.

In Phoenix, Arizona, a citywide tree-planting initiative is slowly increasing canopy cover to reduce the urban heat island effect in neighborhoods that need it the most. Residents pick between several varieties of desert-adapted trees, which are planted on their property by professional arborists, and take care of them with a provided kit.