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As heat waves get hotter, longer, and much more frequent, better air-conditioning alone isn’t enough to keep occupants comfortable—we also need to redesign buildings to help them stay cooler, and avoid millions of ACs straining the grid so much that the power goes out.
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Phoenix has been 110 degrees Fahrenheit—or hotter—for nearly a month. Sanbao, China, reached a record high of 52.2 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit). In Iran, the heat index hit 66.7 degrees Celsius (152 Fahrenheit), near the limits of human survival. This isn’t the new normal—as climate change progresses, the world will get even hotter. Here’s how cities are racing to adapt.
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As the climate crisis worsens, scientists have been urgently working to develop reflective materials, including different types of coatings and films, that could passively cool the Earth. The materials rely on principles of physics that allow thermal energy to travel from Earth along specific wavelengths through what’s known as the transparency or sky window in the atmosphere, and out into deep space.
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Extreme heat disasters like this are becoming increasingly common in regions where high heat used to be rare. Blackouts during severe heat waves can also leave residents who believe they are protected because they have in-home air conditioners at unexpected risk. To prepare, cities, neighborhoods, companies, and individuals can take steps now to reduce the harm.
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A joint Anglo-Italian architectural project has produced a 'floating city' concept - a collective of orb-like houses that would supposedly house up to 50,000 people in the event global warming leads to mass flooding. The concept was hatched by an international team of architects and designers led by Italian firm Luca Curci Architects and UK-based Tim Fu Design, who came together to design a eco-friendly village that adapts to future climate demands.
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One of the most challenging aspects of this change will be to meet mounting cooling demands in an eco-friendly way. Cooling is innately more difficult than heating: any form of energy can become heat, and our bodies and machines naturally generate heat even in the absence of active heating systems. Cooling does not benefit equally from spontaneous generation, making it often more difficult, more costly, or less efficient to implement. Global warming and its very tangible heating effects only exacerbate this reality, intensifying an already accelerating demand for artificial cooling systems. As it stands, many of these systems require large amounts of electricity and rely heavily on fossil fuels to function. The buildings sector must find ways to meet mounting demand for cooling that simultaneously elides these unsustainable effects.
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