Posts tagged with 'cool roofs'
Cities and towns in the Mediterranean and the Middle East have long used white or light-colored roofs and walls to help keep people cool. Today, cities from Ahmedabad to Singapore are also turning to cool roofs to reduce urban heat ...
From hydration breaks during the FIFA World Cup to recent heat waves leaving Europe sweltering in an early summer, extreme heat is reshaping daily life. Around the world, communities are adapting in real time to increasingly high temperatures. During Europe’s ...
On a hot day in February 2024, volunteers dispersed across Cape Town, South Africa, with sensors affixed to their cars. Their aim was to measure heat differences across the city. In Cape Town’s dense, highly developed center, they recorded air temperatures ...
Which neighborhoods are suffering the most from rising urban heat? Where is flooding the biggest challenge? What other cities around the world are struggling with air pollution, and what can we learn from those that have improved the quality of ...
In a city, a grassy park might be a place to stretch out with a book, an asphalt road your route to work, a building wall a canvas for a mural. But beyond their familiar roles, each of these surfaces ...
This op-ed was originally published by Context, the media platform of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, on June 16, 2025. Read the original piece here. A new study has found that 4 billion people – half of the world’s population – endured ...
Resilience in cities is often framed around large-scale infrastructure projects and sweeping policy shifts. We see headlines about billion-dollar climate adaptation plans, smart cities leveraging AI for disaster response and ambitious net-zero pledges. But some of the most impactful solutions ...
By midday in Mathare, a densely populated informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, the sun beats down on the tight rows of wooden stalls and corrugated metal rooftops. At an elevation of 5,889 feet (1,795 meters), Nairobi has long been known ...
The way scientists and policymakers measure heat as they seek to combat rising temperatures across the world’s cities requires more nuance than just looking at the daily outdoor temperature. There are a variety of tools that can help show a ...
Europe is the world’s fastest warming continent, which is severely impacting cities and leading to tens of thousands of deaths, rising hospitalizations, school closures and people adjusting their lives to avoid inhospitable outdoor conditions. The oppressive heat is being felt across the ...
In the crowded slums of Zambia, Africa, members of the Zambia Youth Federation, a social movement of the urban poor, conducted climate change research and presented it in an emotional spoken word poem. Their message let policymakers know how climate ...
Last year shattered global heat records. The world witnessed the effects of rising temperatures in the form of devastating wildfires, severe flooding, extreme heatwaves and more. Poor countries and communities who have contributed the least to causing the climate crisis ...
It’s an island no one in their right mind wants to be on, but sadly many of us increasingly find ourselves due to global warming. “Heat islands” are a concept British climatologist Gordon Manley came up with way back in ...
This summer the Northern Hemisphere has been so hot with record temperatures — including at sea — that discussions have turned to the limits of human survival. Even in the Antarctic, sea ice is failing to re-form, a drastic departure ...
Climate change is impacting cities and their residents in many profound ways, from poor air quality to flooding to biodiversity loss and extreme heat. Now, with the help of a new tool, select cities can access localized, integrated data to ...
