Urban climate data in outreach and education - multidisciplinary insights from Bern, Switzerland

Urban climate data is increasingly produced by measurement networks, remote sensing platforms, or model outputs. Besides serving as an empirical base for scientific, practical, and political purposes, the potentials of urban climate data for communication and education remain often overlooked. Since 2018, the Urban Climate Group at University of Bern has been running a city-wide measurement network to detect intra-urban air temperature variabilities at high spatio-temporal resolutions. Using this data, multiple tools to raise awareness of heat-related risks among the public and approaches to educate pupils about climate change and its effects on cities have been developed in recent years. This presentation aims at providing insights into the interactive visualization tool "Bernometer" and what effects the resulting urban heat maps of Bern may have in educational contexts.

Herefore, we will on the one hand present the app “Bernometer”, which has been designed to provide an interactive map of Bern's urban heat island showing the past, present, and future intra-urban air temperature variability at a high spatial resolution (https://bernometer.unibe.ch). This allows the urban population not only to depict the urban heat stress at specific locations within the city, but also to receive heat alerts and recommendations about how to reduce individual heat stress through adaptive behaviour. On the other hand, we will present the outcomes of an educational intervention using local urban climate data to vary the extent of psychological distance of climate change within the context of urban heat stress. By analysing differences in cognitive, emotional, and behaviour-related responses across a close treatment and a distant treatment group, we investigated the "effectiveness" of proximized climate change education among Swiss adolescents.

Based on these two examples, we will draw multidisciplinary conclusions about learnings and future pathways regarding the usage of urban climate data in the context of climate change outreach and education.