PHOENIX — Reggie Carrillo knows firsthand that where you live can determine how hot your neighborhood gets.
Among the most ambitious is an Urban Heat Leadership Academy launched last year by the Phoenix Revitalization Corporation, a nonprofit community development corporation, and The Nature Conservancy. Better known for preserving natural areas, the nonprofit global conservancy is now also doing more work in urban areas like planting hundreds of trees and overseeing community gardens in Atlanta's South River neighborhood.
In Philadelphia, where temperatures typical fall into the 20s and 30s in the winter, summers are becoming increasingly hotter with more summer days pushing over 90 degrees . Owen Franklin, director of the Trust for Public Land in Pennsylvania, said the Philadelphia project sparked conversations about crowded, aging neighborhoods that experience temperatures up to 20 degrees hotter than nearby ones because they don't have parks or enough tree canopy.
“We are trying to help people to work on solutions that will cool down their neighborhoods over the long term,” said Anna Bettis, the healthy cities program director for The Nature Conservancy in Arizona. “Shade is a resource. If you just look around, you can see how unequally it is distributed in some neighborhoods.”
We need more of this.
About time.