Enhancing Urban Resilience to Heatwaves fast through Public-Private Engagement

Climate change is also changing urban climates, and the number and intensity of heatwaves is increasing, as are flash floods and droughts. Therefore, city administrations and other stakeholders need better information and tools to efficiently manage these new extremes, and adapt their infrastructures to the new realities. Thus, they require operational up-to-date hyperlocal temperature forecast and monitoring to detect “hot spots“, frequency of “heat stress“, and other meteorological benchmark values. These are needed to plan resources and steer short term interventions such as recommending suitable actions to citizens, mobilising helpers, opening heat shelters, etc., as well as policies for construction and management of roads, buildings, parks etc, and for tracking the effectiveness of mitigation measures, such as greening, de-sealing, building insulation, colour changes, etc.
The technical basis is provided by Hyperlocal monitoring and forecasting of temperatures, and other variables. These require reliable urban temperature measurements across a city, linked to urban climate models. This can be achieved at low cost, when researchers, city agencies and private companies work together to develop and employ new technology for this new purpose.

In practice, this requires developing and testing new approaches, overcoming traditional barriers between the players, educating the actors, coordinating efforts and creating business models for continuous improvement. This paper describes the experiences of meteoblue with creating the first operational live city heatmaps with 10 m / 1 h resolution and an hourly MAE of <1.0°C in collaboration with cities in Europe and North America. It also presents a simple project blueprint and recommendations for engagement, for replicating such projects to make many more cities resilient against heatwaves in a short time.