As heat waves blanket much of the U.S. this week, local governments are increasingly looking to help their residents combat the perils of extreme heat.

“A lot of our larger cities have been focusing on this issue for a long time — New York, Los Angeles, [though] they still have a lot to do — but more and more cities are becoming interested and starting to take action,” said Victoria Ludwig, program manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s heat island reduction program, at a Wednesday webinar hosted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

While cities primarily have been concerned with the immediate threat of extreme heat on residents’ health, Ludwig said, jurisdictions now are looking at it through a larger and longer-term lens that includes environmental justice concerns and how to prevent future heat waves from being as severe.

Ludwig also pointed to the growing interest in nature-based solutions such as trees as well as cool pavement — technologies that reduce the heat stored by pavement. “[Cool pavement] used to be kind of a nascent technology,” she said. “It’s getting more and more robust and proven, and if you do it at a large enough scale, you can cool down the city.” Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Antonio are among the cities using the technology.

But barriers to progress remain, Ludwig said. Addressing extreme heat requires cross-departmental work — for example, among the climate office, health department and emergency response officials — which many local governments have not yet done. Plus, solutions to cool the built environment, such as green roofs, increased tree canopy and cool pavement, still need to be scaled up to be effective at a neighborhood level. “It can be done, but it is a challenge to do these kinds of interventions at scale,” Ludwig said.

Read the full article about extreme heat by Ysabelle Kempe at Smart Cities Dive.