Why heat is the defining climate challenge for cities

00:00 – 00:24

Welcome to SEI Asia’s podcast on environment and policy in Asia. In this podcast series, we invite experts to discuss the many critical and complex environmental challenges in Asia, and how to find solutions through policy and partnerships.

00:33 – 01:18

Charmaine: In today’s episode of Environment and Policy in Asia, we are joined by two leading experts on the subject, Andreas Hoy, Senior Expert on Climatology at SEI Tallinn, and Winston Chow, IPCC Co-Chair of Working Group 2 and Professor of Urban Climate at the Singapore Management University. 

So today, the three of us are going to explore how heat is reshaping cities across continents. We are deep diving into the science of shifting heat patterns, the inequalities in who suffers the most, and the lessons from urban design innovations in both Asia and Europe. And lastly, the urgent need to integrate heat into governance and urban resilience agendas. 

Winston and Andreas, welcome to the podcast.

01:19 – 01:20

Winston: Pleasure to be here.

01:21 – 01:22

Andreas: Pleasure to meet you.

01:23 – 01:32

Andreas: OK, I can start. Yeah, I’m a climatologist. I come originally from Germany and I’m very passionate about weather. And actually, I’m also passionate about making weather and climate information more accessible to decision makers and citizens. 

01:33 – 01:50

Winston: I’m a professor of urban climate in Singapore Management University. My other job, which is a bit more exciting, is that two years ago, I was elected as the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group that looks into climate impacts, climate vulnerability, and climate adaptation. 

01:51 – 01:52

Charmaine: Then, Winston, let’s start with you. 

01:53 – 01:53

Winston: Sure.

01:54 – 02:11

Charmaine: It’s monsoon season in Asia, but strangely, it’s still very hot in a lot of parts, in Singapore, in Bangkok, in the Philippines. So, I’m wondering how do these patterns fit into the global climate picture and what the science tell us about why heat is no longer confined to just summer month?

02:12 – 03:08

Winston: In a nutshell, heat in cities is the poster child, or as some will call it, climate disruption. On top of the major causes that we are well understood for how global warming happens with higher emissions of greenhouse gases, your carbon dioxide, your methane, et cetera, et cetera, and also from land cover change from deforestation of rainforests on terrestrial rainforests or marine forests. You also have the double whammy of having cities being developed. So there’s this phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, which happens when you remove away all that forest cover and natural surroundings and you replace it with concrete and asphalt, which during the daytime stores all the heat from the sun. And then at night, it releases that and adds on to the regional and larger scale global warming that happens.  

03:09 – 03:57

Winston: And also, you have the issue of all the various human activities, what some urban climatologists will call urban metabolism, all the additional fuel that you burn from traffic, all the additional energy that you have for cooling indoor environments with air conditioning. What you’re doing is that you’re transferring the heat indoors, outdoors, and so that you have that multiplier effect or that positive feedback or that vicious cycle of additional heat that everybody experiences in a city. So you’ve got that dual combination of heat sources from global climate change to the local effects of people who’ve lived in cities long enough, they’ll feel like, hey, this is weird. You know, it’s getting warmer and warmer. It’s not something that I’ve experienced before, but that’s the story of, you know, climate change and how people’s perceptions.

03:58 – 04:12

Charmaine: Speaking of summer, Andreas, Europe had just come out of another record-breaking summer heat. What stood out to you and how did  European cities respond  to extreme heat this year? 

04:13 – 04:51

Andreas: So let me go to the edges of the European continent, because I want to bring out two striking examples of this summer, and I want to start in the south, which is naturally associated with heat. So, in Western Europe, we saw the warmest June on record, again, another record. We had new national records in Portugal and Spain, we saw more than 46 degrees Celsius there. And also it was, there was a combination of maritime heat wave and the land heat wave because also the Mediterranean seas or record high sea surface temperatures. And of course this increased the heat on land and the heat on land increased the sea surface temperature. So it’s a vicious cycle in a way.  

04:52 – 05:37

Andreas: And then I want to just go up to the northern edge of the continent, which is not really associated with heat because yeah, it’s traditionally cold. But we have seen a record-breaking heat wave above the Arctic Circle in July and early August. And these are places that are not prepared for these kinds of extremes. I just read today they had almost a month with temperatures over 25 degrees. Okay, you can very much laugh about these temperatures, but if you’re not as adapted to this kind of conditions, it’s a lot. And houses and building structures are built for winter cold to keep the cold out in the winter. And if you have this long period of warm temperatures in summer, then there’s a problem with heat inside of buildings.  

05:38 – 06:15

Andreas: So, if we speak about climate change, it’s an effect of climate change that we see more frequent, more intense and longer lasting heat waves. The urban heat island, as Winston mentioned, adds extra intensity because we have all this concrete and asphalt and we have limited green and blue spaces. So, it heats up more during the day and it cools down slow during the night compared to rural surroundings. And it means like if you’re in your flat and you want to sleep and you want to recover from the heat of the day, you cannot really do so in overheated flats. And this really drives up mortality, especially among elderly people. 

06:16 – 06:30

Charmaine: That is a very good segue to our next question. Andreas, you mentioned vulnerability during heat waves. Can you share how social factors amplified the heat risks in European cities? 

06:31 – 07:26

Andreas: There’s some diversity of how people respond to heat. We have groups like small children. I have two small daughters as well, so I see they’re just nearer to the ground. So it’s an issue because the ground warms up and in the end they experience higher temperature. We have people with chronic diseases, we have elderly people. These are all risk groups because they cannot, they’re more exposed to these conditions and they cannot move so quickly away from it as well. Of course, we have also social factors that contribute, especially people living alone, people being socially rather isolated, being less mobile, have a lack of support from family or have just poorly ventilated housing. And then also low income or income disparities come into effect because people with lower income, they often live in dense urban districts with less access to cooler spaces and greenery.  

07:27 – 08:17

Andreas: I can bring one example and Winston maybe knows knows this example because it’s quite popular in literature. It’s the 2003 heat wave in Europe because it was in a way the first really climate change related heat wave, which was especially strong in Western Europe, in France and in Germany. And we had, I mean, estimations go about 70 to 80,000 excess that people or people who died earlier because of this heat during this time and a large group of this were elderly people that were left alone and overheated flats. And this issue after this, after this heat wave, it became in a way a turning point or a kind of wake-up call because this heat wave showed really the limits of unprepared health and social care systems. And since then we have seen some improvements. 

08:18 – 08:41

Andreas: So we see like more heat health action plans who deal with this issue. We have more early warning systems, we have other outreach measures. You need to reach to older people in a different way than to others. You cannot just send some kind of short message or a smartphone. So you can call, for example, call them actively or send some social workers checking on them or have a hotline where they can call from their landline phone.  

08:42 – 09:10

Andreas: But still, I would say that this coping capacity remains uneven and they’re good examples, but they’re somehow scattered. And also there’s a kind of, again, this income aspect, so wealthier regions, they can adapt faster and more efficiently, while elsewhere vulnerable groups remain still at risk, and if I still have the time, I can say that we deal in Europe with those issues.

09:11 – 10:16

Andreas: We have, for example, one project in Pärnu in Estonia. It’s a coastal city. It’s Estonia’s summer capital in a way. And here we do a hazard mapping of urban heat islands where we feed in weather sensor data, remote sensing data, microscale data, and then we combine it with exposure and vulnerability data like density of population, age groups, health, income. social support status and so on. Plus, we do interviews and focus groups and all this information comes together to identify the areas with high social vulnerability to heat related risk. And the aim of this work is that we want to support the municipality to prioritize adaptation, for example, planting new trees, having more shading or cooling intervention in districts where we have many elderly people, for example, or disadvantaged households. And yeah, this is an example how we can use data that we measure to really give the information to cities that they are able to act on this issue. 

10:17 – 10:47

Winston: Well, that’s a fantastic example of a very good integrated, you know, heat action plan for any city is to take into account the best sources of early warning of information from climate data from forecasting and disseminating that in a manner that can get people to anticipate all the various heat hazards that can come their way. Just two quick points to add on to the fantastic description of what Andreas said.  

10:48 – 11:20

Winston: One is that it appears that apart from the lesson that, a big lesson from 2003, was I think the realization that heat-related impacts from climate change from urbanization It’s no longer just restricted to a tropical, subtropical, low latitude situation where it’s hot all the time. Andreas is right, you might, now I don’t laugh or I tell my students don’t laugh at the fact that it’s warm in Northern Europe at 25 Celsius and we’re here in the tropics or it’s 35 and then we start to feel uncomfortable because that’s the point.

11:21 – 12:17

Winston: Existing populations who have been based in those cities in northern latitudes or high latitudes, they are acclimatized to a certain temperature, they are acclimatized to a certain timing of seasons. But when climate change disrupts the existing weather patterns with respect to extreme temperature, we’re also seeing earlier springs and later autumns or delayed winters, that period of which you can be more vulnerable, depending on the location is also extended in duration. And more oftentimes than not, it’s not the hottest heat waves that results in the highest amounts of deaths because that occurs later during the summer season. It’s the first onset of the heat wave that oftentimes triggers those medical responses, those medical emergencies. And regrettably, we are seeing all these episodes occurring way more frequently because of climate change, because of more people living in cities that are not prepared for the heat wave or the heat waves that are to come. 

12:18 – 12:40

Charmaine: It’s good you mentioned that, Winston, because in Asia, when there’s extreme heat, it’s usually a different vulnerable population than what Andreas was describing. Here in Asia, it’s more it’s the outdoor workers, it’s the informal settlements, low-income groups who are most affected. So how do urban design and socioeconomic inequalities shape these risks? 

12:41 – 13:40

Winston: They shape it tremendously, particularly the socioeconomic inequalities. You’re looking into the vulnerability component of certain communities that are at bigger risk to heat-related issues. You look into where they are housed in your informal settlements, or people who don’t have access to physical cooling mechanisms, or people who live in areas that have limited green spaces or blue spaces, which we know are proven approaches to reducing urban temperatures and reducing temperatures either in the day or in the night. So they will be in areas that will be under chronic levels of heat stress. If your minimum temperatures, which are driven by the heat island, are going to be above, significantly above average, then your physiological response to recover will be severely hampered. That again adds on to the problems and then it is more predisposed towards areas that don’t have green spaces.  

13:41 – 14:28

Winston: The other dimension which you’ve rightly pointed out, Charmaine, is that in a lot of Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian contexts, and increasingly so in other parts of less developed countries, colloquially, the Global South in Africa and South America, the fastest growing cities are located in these continents. And in order for those cities to have housing, in order for those cities to have office space and other sorts of infrastructure, you need to have your people who work outdoors in the construction sector. You need the people who sell food or sell products outdoors away from shelter. And again, if you have them exposed to your longer summers, your higher temperatures for more frequent and intense heat waves, then you’ve got a bigger exposure. 

14:29 – 14:48

Charmaine: My next question is, I guess, for the both of you, having said all of that, what are the parallels that you see between vulnerable groups in Europe and vulnerable groups in Asia? And with these comparisons, what does it teach us about designing a more equal, fairer heat adaptation policies? 

14:49 – 15:37

Winston: The drivers of how these communities in, you know, irrespective of whether in Europe or in Asia or South America or North America, get more or less the same from the climate impact drivers of climate change, as well as from the urban climate varying. What would matter, though, is that even though these contexts are more or less similar, the local context, the culture, the sort of behavioural patterns, the psychology, collective sociology of these communities will significantly differ. And that, in turn, would also have significant impact, significant influence on the right sort of heat action plans, the right sort of adaptation approaches towards these communities.  

15:38 – 15:56

Winston: In this part of the world versus in Western Europe or Northern Europe, we use a lot of air conditioning. This studio is very comfortable, even though outside is 34, 35 Celsius. It’s a nice, you know, with the surroundings, it’s very nice and comfortable here, thermally comfortable.

15:57 – 16:30

Winston: In most places in Western Europe during the summer, they don’t have air conditioning by design because of the reasons that Andreas has pointed out. You want to, you know, prepare for winter as well. And there are some construction options that’s geared towards retaining heat. So you can have smarter urban design, you can have ways of increasing wind flow in European cities that can enhance thermal comfort and reduce risk, which can work in those areas if there’s a predominantly strong wind pattern that flows above the cities there.

16:31 – 16:48

Winston: Those examples, however, don’t seem to work in a place like Singapore, which has absolutely almost zero wind speeds in Singapore at the low latitudes. It’s very, very low. So we have to look into alternative ways of trying to use the natural environment to the benefit of reducing heat vulnerability for residents there. 

16:49 – 16:49

Charmaine: Andreas?

16:50 – 17:23

Andreas: Just like if you have poor housing conditions, for example, and especially like overheated flats, I think in Asia maybe we don’t even see so many overheated flats. So indoor heat is maybe a different problem than in Europe where we see this more because we don’t use air conditioning so much. But then the problem there is probably then really more outdoor workers, even if this is something what we have as a problem here as well. And it’s less discussed in Europe compared to Asia because, yeah, it’s not so imminent or maybe it’s not the most visible group of people during heat waves.

17:24 – 17:44

Andreas: But I mean, temperatures are also getting warmer and then people working on construction site or working in agriculture, they face this heat and they are getting problems with this. So in the end, it’s not so much about age or health, it’s about like the access to resources, the access to greenery, the access to a possibility to cool down. 

17:45 – 18:06

Charmaine: Andreas, you mentioned earlier that this project in Parnu in Estonia. And Winston, I know that you’ve also worked with the Singapore government and also your own research on cooling. So, I would like to ask you both to tell us about those projects.

18:07 – 18:48

Andreas: I want to start with too much water, because in Copenhagen, they’re not used to intensive cloudburst normally because they’re rather north of location, but in 2011 they had a cloudburst with between 100 and 150 millimetres in most places of the city in just two hours, and of course this caused a lot of problems, so we had flooded and evacuated hospitals. The EU headquarter of the World Health Organization was flooded and closed after their offices were underwater. So, we had many buildings, streets and other infrastructures flooded. We had more than 100,000 insurance claims. We had one to two billion euro damage.

18:49 – 19:40

Andreas: So, what do you do out of this? Copenhagen decided to do something really cool. They started to draft a Copenhagen Cloudburst management plan, and this was already ready in 2012. In this plan, they want to, and they started to upgrade the infrastructure to manage future extreme rainfall. The financing is interesting. It was largely financed through a levy on the water bill. So, it’s also community driven and community approved. And this plan resulted in a shift in thinking. So, it takes a sponge city approach to manage the water on the surface instead of just like getting rid of it and relying on the existing and as we could see, overwhelmed several systems. So they were, for example, street and roads redesigned so that they can safely transport the water during a flooding time. 

19:41 – 20:39

Andreas: They redesigned and installed new green spaces and parks that served as recreational areas during 99.9% of the time, but they can be converted into large retention basins during a flood. They also installed rain gardens and bioswales and other kind of really cool installations to absorb and slow down the rainwater runoff. And it has to do with heat mitigation as well, because in heat mitigation, we use actually similar strategies. We also use blue and green infrastructure. Of course, we add like reflective surfaces or permeable surfaces to lower temperature. But in this way, Copenhagen does both. They’re getting more flood proof, and they’re doing this since 15 years, so it’s visible. You can see it. And they also reduced their urban heat island. They improved the quality of life, they have more green spaces, they have more biodiversity.  

20:40 – 22:10

Andreas: In Tallinn, we have something cool as well. It’s our pollinator highway. It’s kind of a 14 kilometres long green corridor, which is a space for movement for people. So, it was made accessible for people. It passes through six out of eight districts in Tallinn. And these are areas which were previously not really accessible. They were occupied by old railway tracks, overhead power lines, and so on. And we did something here as well. Among other things, we installed a weather sensor network in 2022. By chance, 2022, it was a hot summer in Northern Europe, and we could really see the difference between this place and to build up spaces in the surroundings, especially like in terms of warm nights, tropical nights over 20 degrees. We saw like up to two weeks of these nights in built up spaces, but we saw much lower number 0 to 8 along the corridor. And we could in this way prove that it makes sense to integrate such corridors into a city design from a micro climatic point of view because it’s kind of a natural air conditioner. We don’t need artificial air conditioning. We have this natural air conditioning that lowers temperature and we also make an attractive place accessible for people. We see more biodiversity. We have higher satisfaction of people living nearby these areas because they’re getting accessible. 

22:11 – 22:23

Winston: Perfect answer. Well, what can I say to add on to that? One is that, Charmaine, your point about you cool as in a cool city but not cool as in not hip. I disagree with that. 

22:24 – 22:26

Charmaine: You can disagree. We can have both. 

22:27 – 23:11

Winston: We can have both. We can have both, primarily because of Andreas’s last point. Cool cities that reduce, you know, the heat footprint by a variety of ways. If you have the community there working together with top-down initiatives, so the ground up, you know, sort of action for looking into spaces where heat adaptation approaches like replacing parking spaces with permeable surfaces or using them as a rooftop garden or community garden, that’s cool by itself because we know that as an enabler for adaptation and mitigation, you need to have community buy-in. You need to make that sustainable and sustainable, not just in sustainable development, but sustainable in terms of the robustness of those actions in the long run.

23:12 – 24:08

Winston: So, examples from Copenhagen or from Tallinn, they’re also repeated in Singapore in a by and large sense, but that’s because Singapore, we tend to have a very strong top-down approach that can, as some have argued, try to overwhelm the ground-up initiatives. But there are also engagements from citizen communities in small towns in Singapore that also try to have community gardens in spaces that not just reduce the heat issue, but also allows for people, elderly, children to come in together and enjoy that space, which speaks to the core benefits that Andreas pointed out in terms of having a sponsored city of flood control measures for adaptation to that climate risk, also aligning with temperature regulation with that particular ecosystem service which park spaces provide.

24:09 – 25:12

Winston: So, in the case of Singapore, including Singapore, the project I’ve been leading for almost eight years, nine years, we’ve seen how a variety of approaches, which are very well known, green spaces, they are bigger, they are connected, reductions in better urban design. So, one of the things that we’ve learned, two of the things that we learned in a low wind environment in Singapore that can work to enhance thermal comfort at pedestrian level is that for Singapore’s financial district, the new financial district. If you look into the orientation, it’s orientated towards the prevailing monsoon. That’s one. The second thing is that the skyscrapers or the towers, the built environment, it’s not uniform in height. It’s actually staggered. You’ve got a short, tall, medium, short, tall, medium sort of approach because that sort of difference in height acts as a sail. It brings in wind from upper levels of the boundary layer, the atmosphere, bringing it down towards pedestrian level. So it flushes out pollutants at the same time that the additional wind enhances thermal comfort at ground level.  

25:13 – 26:21

Winston: And it’s this, they’ve also, I mean, part of the other things that we found is that if you go back, if you’re an architecture student and you look into housing in Southeast Asia, you’ll see a lot of houses on stilts, you know, Kelong, in the other sorts of villages in Kampong in Malaysia and Singapore. They were built on stilts to prevent floods, but they were also built on stilts to allow for unimpeded airflow at pedestrian level. So that again, you don’t block the wind flow that can keep you, that is very uncomfortable. You allow for the wind flow to go through unimpeded so that people feel comfortable. And this design element was put into place into the early public housing flats in Singapore. You had void decks that allowed for this sort of cooling to be magnified for people who, for the 75 to 80% of us who live in public housing in Singapore.

26:22 – 26:42

Winston: So those are lessons that we’ve learned that are applied from the scientific research. And I think the common theme irrespective of all these cities is that the solutions are there. It’s the other sorts of non-technological aspects that are required to make the reduction of heat vulnerability work in the long run.

26:51 – 27:18

Charmaine: You mentioned that the solutions are there. So then my question now for the both of you, if you could redesign a city from scratch to handle extreme heat, extreme temperatures, what would be your first priority?  

One, is it green space? Second, is it water? Third, building design? or last, policy? It’s a bit of a trick question, but I’m interested to hear what you both think. 

27:19 – 28:23

Andreas: I can, I can, but I will not choose. I refuse to choose because I think this all goes together. It’s one package. It’s one important package. And if we, Winston spoke about sponge cities, this is a very good example that you have blue and green solutions together.  

So, you use nature-based solutions to absorb and reuse the rainwater that acts like a natural sponge. You add a lot of green roofs, green walls, permeable pavements, parks that are connected ideally by green corridors. You can go into building colours, make it more light, for example, and so on. And this helps to prevent different types of floods, like rain-induced floods, fluvial floods, then river induced fluvial floods, coastal related floods, so all kinds of floods because the rainwater is stored and infiltrates and evaporates at the place where it falls. So, it’s not redirected because we just want to get rid of this. And it also, it cools the city.  

28:24 – 28:56

Andreas: I mean, this, the example of Copenhagen was a good example from European perspective, but I know that Asia is really on the forefront of this kind of solutions. And I’m curious of what Winston will say about this. And maybe you can also speak a bit more about your Cooling Singapore initiative, because I find this really interesting to create your digital urban climate twin with so many different kinds of data sources that really create a twin of the real world of this place. 

28:57 – 29:50

Winston: Okay, two or three different questions there for me to answer. First, Charmaine’s question about whether option A, B, C, or D. Answer is E, all of the above and other sorts of issues. And what we found is that if you had, don’t fall into that trap of thinking that option A or B or C are the answers because in climate change, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. So, you have to consider all of the above, including policies because, as we know, it’s one thing to know that these things work in theory or in the lab. You need to find a way to upscale that as best as possible. And having governmental policies that enable these sorts of good overall climate resilience, that includes adaptation and medication options, is the way forward. But I will also add a few other things to come to mind.

29:51 – 30:53

Winston: One is that it’s my day job, education how we convey our research results to our students across all levels from primary school, elementary school, all the way up to college or university. And also, increasingly now with postgraduate students, executive development, there’s a burgeoning interest from these, from my students into knowing what works in terms of climate action. So, our job and all of us, for Andreas and Charmaine, yourself included with this podcast, getting the word out, telling people what works in terms of good science-based research that can translate into reducing heat vulnerability, that can translate into reducing floods that are, at the same time, another major risk to a lot of cities worldwide. We need to get that done to help ensure that this action is sustainable in the long run.  

30:54 – 31:34

Winston: You can have all the best ideas in the world, you can have all the best policies in the world, but if you do not have the sort of supply-side financing to make sure that these adaptation projects can work. Typically, the view is that an adaptation project is supposed to be a public good and it has to be funded by government. We need to find a way or a financial mechanism to complement what a city government or a federal government or provincial government is supposed to do to protect their citizens. I think that thinking is strongly, it is getting accelerated or ramped up. And I’ve seen that happen since, at least from the Paris Agreement 10 years ago. 

31:35 – 32:05

Winston: But there’s also a requirement from the demand side as well. Communities need to change their behaviours. They need to understand or look towards behaviours or purchasing products that are sustainable, that can help with climate action. Taking public transportation instead of buying a car, getting rid of your petrol or diesel cars, and using electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles, which I’m seeing increasingly in Bangkok these days, that’s another step forward.

32:06 – 33:08

Winston: Last point about designing a city and all, and before I go to Andreas’s issue about the digital twin, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that cities that have resources, cities that have money, looking at my home country in Singapore, for instance, are the only way forward to resolving the heat crisis. I firmly disagree with that because the gold standard in terms of how a city deals with heat-related mortality comes from a less developing country, from a city in a less developing country, Ahmedabad, to be precise. So it’s a perfect case study of how a city respond to a massive heatwave event in 2011, where on paper, 1,300 people died, but in reality, much more than that. They looked into integrating the best information they could get. They asked the Indian Meteorological Department, instead of a five-day forecast, can we get a 14-day, 21-day forecast for a heatwave? because the additional time that they have can help with the preparation. 

33:09 – 34:15

Winston: They had limited resources, so they coordinated across different sectors of the city. They looked at their medical professionals and said, Hey, can we deploy you in places where we know these informal settlements or these communities are more vulnerable than others? Can you be a rapid response in case a heat wave happens? Can we trust our communication folks from radio, from television in the days before, you know, 5G internet? Tell everybody who’s working outdoors in the fields or in construction, get out of there. Stay away and find shelter, otherwise you’re going to die. They also leverage community leaders. They’re religious leaders. They’re sort of like community head honchos and ask them to disseminate the information and also provide feedback as to whether or not the resources can be better deployed during heatwave events. And also, they invested in non-air conditioning. They looked into green spaces. They looked into blue spaces because the science work that Andreas and colleagues in terms of making sure that there is a discernible cooling influence from green spaces, can that be put into places of higher vulnerability? 

34:16 – 34:51

Winston: So all this was done without substantial investments in finances. And it succeeded immensely because the mortality rate from subsequent heat wave events in Ahmedabad just plummeted because of the very integrated cross-sectoral sort of implementation of a heat plan. And again, gold standard, a lot of Global North cities learn from that. So again, let’s not fall into that trap of thinking that you only need money or you only need resources for these heat adaptation plans to work. 

34:52 – 35:35

Winston: For the Cooling Singapore project, the big idea was to try and develop the working digital urban climate twin that looks into how we integrate the building models, how integrated regional, local scale, micro scale climate models, how we integrate the transport models as well, because we’ve wanted to pinpoint where the sources of heat come from. And we tried to, the challenge was, wasn’t in making sure that the model coupling could work. We needed to validate that, and we found that in some cases under, what do you call that, the cooling impact wasn’t really represented well. It was underestimated in some cases.  

35:36 – 36:16

Winston: We also found out that using the twin, the sort of energy flows that goes into your traffic, your vehicular emissions, If you could, I mean, the sort of findings that we found was that it contributed to about 15-20% of the heat footprint of Singapore. And that had implications as well for, I mean, the information from the digital twin gave government agencies in Singapore insights into how best to not just tweak the heat problem of burning petrol and diesel for cars that generated waste heat that drives the heat island, but it also complemented ongoing larger scale national initiatives in. 

36:17 – 36:50

Charmaine: So, you both, this is all we’re almost at the end, but this you both mentioned like the future of heat governance needs a few things. Well, many things, but some of them is like, you know, having that data, having education, having the financing and also of course community buy in. So how can we encourage people in policy or governments to move faster in integrating heat resilience into urban agendas? 

36:51 – 36:51

Andreas: I can

36:52 – 36:53

Winston: That’s a very tough question. 

36:53 – 36:53

Andreas: Yeah, it is

36:54 – 36:54

Winston: It is.

36:55 – 36:55

Andreas: It is.

37:00 – 37:48

Andreas: And I’m just thinking like I I think that. It’s too often that heat is treated rather as a short-term emergency. So, heat comes and goes and when it comes, we need to react, and we need to manage peak events. But in the end, it’s a structural risk. And if we design our cities and this is a very long-term process which takes a lot of time, decades of time actually. So, it should be considered already at the scratch of urban planning of designing health systems of making infrastructural decisions. And for this, it’s very important to consider data that we have and also involve a lot of different expertises. I mean, a good example I can bring is going back to elderly people.  

37:49 – 38:12

Andreas: In Germany now, in some regions, they use predictive tools to warn care homes and hospitals in advance of a heat wave. And this is something like it’s responding to a short-term emergency, but in the end it’s a long-term planning to set up this kind of systems. And this is this is very effective because it gives a possibility for them to prepare the cooling or adjust the routines and and check on those people who are specifically vulnerable in those places to really protect them.  

38:13 – 38:55

Andreas: On the other hand, we know with climate change, heat extremes will intensify in cities. This problem is more problematic. The heat will expand into new regions like Northern Europe, what I mentioned, and those places are partly not prepared for heat preparedness. So, thinking, bringing this into the kind of structures is not so easy. It helps if you have a kind of cross-sectoral coordination. What is important also is like we need supportive evidence to improve urban design, to have better building codes which are adapted to the growing problem of heat.

38:56 – 39:28

Andreas: So, in the end, we need to come from more reactive measures into a long-term institutionalized planning. And for this, we need also finances. That’s important because often green and blue infrastructure, it’s something like it’s a nice to have, but in the end it’s not nice to have. It’s not optional, it’s mandatory. So, if we treat it as mandatory aspect of city planning, then we will have also better and more stable funding. And this helps to really turn cities into a better place to live and being more heat adapted as well. 

39:29 – 39:57

Winston: I can’t improve on that answer. Wonderful, Andreas. If I, maybe a different way of posing this if, and I’ve spoken to several municipal officials on this, I adopt the carrot and stick approach. The stick is that if you think climate change is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This doesn’t factor in all the compounding and cascading impacts that will happen as we barrel past 1.5 and hit the two and two and a half degrees C.  

39:58 – 41:15

Winston: In Singapore, the concern is, not so much on heat, I would say, but it’s actually on food insecurity because the heat does affect agriculture and the heat does affect farming and everything else that we source of. How do you cope with that sort of compound risk that will happen? That is the challenge. And if you ignore that, that aspect of heat and thinking, oh, it’s only going to affect my cities, but it does affect everything else that goes into your cities, you’ve got a problem. And these oftentimes cascade as well. It cascades onto the point that if the heat stresses become too uncomfortable and if you live in a city that is also subject to other climate-related hazards that run the range of too much water, too little water, too stormy, not stormy enough, et cetera, et cetera, you tend to drive people away. And when I speak about this cascading risk on your human capital, your very, let’s say, your high-net-worth individuals who come to a city and contribute substantially to your tax revenue. If they say, I’m sick and tired of heat waves, I’m sick and tired of my family being subject to all these climate issues and we’re leaving, your tax revenue is going to take a big hit.  

41:16 – 42:21

Winston: And again, this all stems or this is the stick of climate change that will impact you if you ignore it or if you underplay that influence. The carrots, though, is that there’s a strong business case for climate change. There’s a strong policy case of dealing with climate change. It’s a vote winner. It’s a developmental issue. If you find ways of bringing in sustainable development approaches into climate action, be it for climate adaptation with, as Andreas pointed out, all the various green nature-based solutions, green infrastructure that come into play add in elements for sequestration of carbon, a small amount for green spaces, but still not insubstantial in some cases, that it can lead on to multipliers in terms of the well-being of your cities, for economic productivity as well. Good ways of trying to combine what is needed for a good response for climate adaptation or mitigation with overall developmental goals for a city.  

42:22 – 42:40

Winston: So having a messaging approach that combines that carrot and stick approach can hopefully lead to the outcomes, you know, the sort of like new instruments or the new methods that Andreas has elaborated in his answer already. So that’s my take on talking to people that might be resistant to climate action here. 

42:41 – 42:56

Charmaine: Final question, what is it that you want to leave our listeners within this discussion about heat, about adaptation, about bringing all of this science into better policy making for the people? 

42:57 – 43:52

Winston: Can I go first, Andreas? The solutions or the sort of ways of reducing risk of enhancing mitigation not only should they not be siloed or have the failing of thinking there’s a silver bullet? What makes for a successful heat resilient city is inclusivity. Bringing as many voices to the table, not just from scientists or from corporates or from government officials or from various people who are living long and have been around in cities long enough, but also other vulnerable stakeholders, far too often, discussions about adaptation solutions oftentimes omit the communities that can be best placed to manage that solution. 

43:53 – 44:26

Winston: In the case of, let’s say, a nature-based solution, like keeping a park space or a tract of native land untouched, it’ll be good to bring communities who benefit from that or who manage that into the process because you need a stakeholder to try and make sure that that solution persists and is sustainable for the long run. So, there are lots of elements into what makes for good heat action policies. Inclusivity is one of those that oftentimes is underemphasized, but it should be emphasized. 

44:27 – 44:27

Charmaine: Andreas?

44:28 – 45:14

Andreas: We have a lot of data and insights, but the problem is often that it stays in reports, it’s discussed with specialists, and it’s not guiding long-term city planning what it should. We also know what works. We have discussed it here extensively. We need more greenery, we need more trees, we need better building codes, we need better lighter surface colours, we need sponge concepts, nature-based solutions. But still, in many cities, there are new and more areas sealed by concrete. And so, it’s not the lack of knowledge that hinders action, it’s the lack of adoption and the lack of implementation of the solutions that we know that work. And I think this is important. 

45:21 – 45:32

Thank you for listening to SEI Asia’s podcast on environment and Policy in Asia. For more information on these topics, guests and our work, please visit our website on www.sei.org.