Heat waves move into federal, state and local policy

The Biden administration is taking unprecedented steps to address the rising heat in what many are already deeming the hottest year on record by releasing its National Heat Strategy, a 37-page strategy document outlining how the Administration will work with federal agencies and state and local governments to address the growing threat of extreme heat.

But President Biden and the executive branch are not alone. A bill introduced earlier this month would classify extreme heat as a major disaster under the purview of Federal Emergency Management Agency, a move that is gaining momentum and that has long had support from many state organizations, local governments and lawmakers.

“Extreme heat is not just an environmental crisis, it’s a serious threat to our public – and communities across the country are struggling to respond. What we’re facing today wasn’t what we were experiencing 30 or 40 years ago. This is a different world we are in,” said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra. “The National Heat Strategy recognizes the growing threat of heat, especially on vulnerable populations. The federal government is taking steps to build a heat resilient future for our entire country, from helping families get air conditioners to protecting farmworkers from heat events and unsafe air. Every action we take and every dollar invested in prevention, preparation and health resilience is a step towards ensuring a healthier and safer future for all.”

And while the federal government gets its ducks in a row to provide a coordinated response to the ongoing deadly heat waves that grip many cities across the country, many of those local governments are already taking the matter in their own hands and beginning to institute large scale projects and efforts to limit the harshest impacts of extreme heat.

“Working within their authorities and through their diverse programs, Federal agencies can play unique roles in supporting State, local, Tribal and Territorial governments and other entities in preparing for and managing the effects of extreme heat,” the Biden Administration’s National Heat Strategy said.

The administration also plans to “research strategies to integrate heat emergency considerations within disaster preparedness, response and recovery capabilities at the state, local, Tribal and territorial levels, including personal protective equipment effectiveness,” the document said, in addition to improving “methods and data to quantify the present and future human health and socioeconomic effects of extreme heat events including cascading infrastructure failures.”

The National Heat Strategy states that its goals are for communication, outreach and education to help spread awareness and inspire action to address the impacts of heat; advance understanding of heat and its impacts to develop science-based services and solutions for enhancing resilience; to improve and facilitate an integrated approach with access to heat information, services and solutions to support international, national state, local territorial, tribal and individual actions; in addition to solidifying the National Integrated Heat Health Information System, who funded the report.

The document provides many commitments on outreach, on measuring the effects of extreme heat and setting the stage for what the administration may do in the future but does signal at least some commitment to the methods already being deployed at the state and local level.

The administration aims to “recommend strengthening the adoption and enforcement of building codes and standards and energy efficiency codes and standards that support passive survivability of building occupants and building systems during extreme heat events that coincide with (or cause) power outages and reduce stress on the nation’s electric grid,” the heat strategy said.

The executive branch will also “understand and project heat-related impacts on green, gray and blue infrastructure and related compounding or cascading effects and their impact on health. This includes studies of heat-related impacts on the degradation of materials and increased energy use in buildings.”

Professor Steffen Lehmann, director of the Urban Futures Lab, Las Vegas School of Architecture at University of Nevada Las Vegas said in an interview with the Bond Buyer that in order to combat this growing threat in any meaningful way, multiple solutions need to be applied.

“I’m not asking for more policy, I’m just asking for updates to existing policy and take out some outdated building code that is maybe twenty or thirty years old,” Lehmann said. “I think we need to change the building code in four areas.”

Lehmann is calling for a mandate against black roof tiles, which according to him are the worst you can have and make the whole situation for yourself, your city and your energy bill, much worse. Green roofs, also called a living roof or vegetated roof, have vegetation that absorb rainwater under a waterproof panel and help to combat the heat island effect, where urban environments have higher temperatures than the surrounding areas, according to NYC Buildings. Other countries such as Australia, Israel, Greece, France and the Bahamas already have such legislation prohibiting black and concrete roofs.

“I think that could be interesting legislation,” Lehmann said. “It’s like when people realized that smoking is not good for your health and then legislation came in place against smoking, or when people began wearing seatbelts. And now today, we are used to not smoking inside a building and used to wearing a seat belt.”

Another large contributor to the heat of urban areas is parking lots, and legislation that mandates the planting of trees, or one for every six cars, to help create shaded areas will help to reduce the heating effects of asphalt, which is necessary to some degree in paving roads and streets. The third pillar that could be updated in the building code is for increasing the amount of shade in public spaces, which could take the form of planting more trees with larger leaves, or building projects with canopies where people can sit and linger.

“Each new project should be asked to provide an increase of shade in public space,” said Lehmann, who said personally he’s against additional regulations and bureaucracy but thinks this all can be implemented into existing codes at the state level.

But there is often a discrepancy between what can be mandated at the state level and what is practical and already being done by and for municipalities. 

“A lot of folks want us to have our community centers, our libraries, our senior centers as cooling centers to serve as a place to provide water, to identify heat stroke,” said Ann Simon, sustainability officer for the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Well it’s sort of unfair to those facilities if they’re not provided with training, funding, extended hours and adjusted programming, because many of these facilities, like community centers, are full of children. It’s going to require us to make changes in our budgeting and our programming.”

The City of Albuquerque launched its “Operation Cooldown 2024” at the beginning of the Summer, following on from the initial launch the previous summer, and provides Albuquerque residents with maps and resources to access the various pools, splash pads and parks.

Part of this strategy was developed from research projects the city did in 2021, which saw many of the city’s staff participate in the research by taking special sensors around the city to identify which areas collect the most heat. Simon strapped one of these sensors onto her car and drove it around to measure, while others took bikes and measured bike trails. 

“We measured that there was an almost 17% temperature differential between a cooler part of the city, probably near the Bosque river where we have more tree canopy versus the big urban paved parking lot,” Simon said. 

But they are still in the beginning stages and are still looking at where and how they can be most effective.

“It’s going to require us to start thinking about potentially putting a heat strategy person in every department, or at least having one person in every department assigned a role of having to participate when we have these extreme heat events,” Simon said. She added that they are working with officials at the state level every step of the way and welcomes further collaborations from all other levels of government.

Planting trees is already recognized as one of the most effective ways in bringing urban temperatures down by providing shade, deflecting radiation and releasing moisture into the atmosphere. The City of Tucson, Arizona, through its Tucson million trees initiative, has committed to planting a million trees around the city by 2030. The City of Las Vegas, Nevada, is less ambitious with a commitment of 60,000 trees, which UNLV’s Lehmann believes is way under what is needed.

But politicians from Nevada are working to make extreme heat a national issue. Sen. Jacky Rosen introduced the Extreme Heat Emergency Act, which would classify extreme heat as a major disaster under FEMA and Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., helped co-sponsor the Extreme Weather and Heat Response Modernization Act on the House side.

Even that classification won’t be brought on without a fight. Ben Watkins, director of Florida’s Bond Division called the move “mission creep” and just on Wednesday, FEMA announced that its disaster relief fund has run completely dry.

“As Las Vegas endures recent record-breaking temperatures, it makes sense that our traditional response to extreme weather events – especially extreme heat – should be reviewed to more carefully consider the effects of these events on our critical infrastructure, public health and overall economy,” said Carolyn Levering, emergency manager for the City of Las Vegas. “Passage of this act will support important studies and make resources more accessible to our region and across the country to help local emergency management response efforts better prepare for and more effectively combat, the effects of extreme weather events, especially the extreme heat of the summer months in desert areas like Las Vegas.”

Heat-related deaths have been steadily rising in recent years, with approximately 1,602 deaths in 2021, 1,722 deaths in 2022 and 2,302 deaths in 2023, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Lehmann believes those figures are in actuality much larger due to heat’s ability to accelerate existing illnesses.

For those reasons, he thinks extreme heat will ultimately have to be classified as a major disaster under FEMA because it’s the “silent killer”.