Sustainable North Florida
Discussions with the people building a sustainable future in North Florida
Sustainable North Florida
Summer in the City: Dr. Adam Rosenblatt discusses Urban Heat
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With the beautiful weather we've been having recently, it might be hard to remember that record-breaking heat in the summer has become the new normal - and urban areas are on the frontlines. To adapt we need to develop new strategies to beat the heat when it's at its worst.
Our guest today is Dr. Adam Rosenblatt. Adam was one of the leaders of an urban heat study conducted in Jacksonville to understand which parts of the city are the most vulnerable. This information is being used to guide future urban planning decisions.
We also cover the basics of climate change. Adam is a great communicator, and I think that he does a pretty good job of explaining the science in a way that is easy to understand, but also very pragmatic. Even if you are already familiar with the science of climate change, it's worth a listen - you might pick up a few ideas that will help you in your own climate conversations with friends and family.
Get Connected:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrosenblatt/
Helpful Links:
Interactive Heat Map of Jacksonville
Climate Perceptions by County
Clean Air Northeast Florida Greenhouse Gas Inventory
Understanding Climate Change and Urban Heat
Speaker 1Welcome to Sustainable North Florida . I'm your host , Lorianne Santamaria .
Speaker 2The great thing is that there's tons of solutions to these heat issues . Right , there's a lot of options out there for how we can tackle this . We just have to decide to do it and we have to put the money in place to fund these kinds of projects , and luckily , the city is starting to do that .
Speaker 1With the beautiful weather we've been having recently , it might be hard to remember , but record-breaking heat in the summer has become the new normal , and urban areas are the front lines . In order to adjust , we need to develop new strategies to beat the heat when it's at its worst . Our guest today is Dr Adam Rosenblatt . He was one of the leaders of an urban heat study that was conducted in Jacksonville to understand which parts of the city are the most vulnerable . This information is being used to guide future urban planning decisions . We also covered the basics of climate change .
Speaker 1Adam's a great communicator and I think he does a pretty good job of explaining the science in a way that's easy to understand but also very pragmatic . Even if you're already familiar with the science of climate change , it's worth a listen . You might pick up a few ideas that will help you in your own climate conversations with friends and family . Here's my discussion with Dr Adam Rosenblatt . Welcome , adam . Looking forward to this conversation , we've asked you to join us on the show to help shed light on a topic that I think anyone who was in Jacksonville this past summer will understand , and that's the record-breaking heat that we experienced . But before we get into that , can you just introduce yourself at a high level to the audience and let them know who you are and what you do .
Speaker 2Yeah , I'm an assistant professor of biology at the University of North Florida here in Jacksonville and I do research on the effects of climate change on plants and animals and the ecosystems that we rely on . But I also have a long history of advocacy and activism when it comes to climate change legislation and education and outreach , trying to get people to understand what's going on and why we need to be concerned about the climate crisis .
Speaker 1Great . Can you tell us about what drove you in this direction ? Is it the way that you grew up ? Is it something that you learned later on in life ? What led you down this path ?
Speaker 2Well , the first time I was sort of exposed to the idea of climate change was by chance really . I mean , I wasn't seeking it out or anything . I did this summer program when I was in high school at Villanova University and as part of the summer program we were put into groups and we had to choose sort of a project to do , and it just so happened that that summer was when there was a lot of conversation going on about the Kyoto Protocol , which was one of the early attempts at an international agreement around climate change , and that is really what sparked my interest in it . And you know , this was like what . This was 2001 or something right .
Speaker 2So climate change wasn't as big of a talking point in the media as it is today . I mean , I'm sure I've heard about it , but I don't think I'd really spent a lot of time thinking about it until that summer . But that was the thing that first got me interested in it . And then , of course , I continued learning about it in college , my first scientific research thinking about animal behavior and how animals are responding to changes in the environment . So it all kind of built from there .
Speaker 1Okay , so before we get into urban heat , which will be our main topic today , can you give us a little bit of a background on global warming in general and why temperatures are rising ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so temperatures are rising because of greenhouse gas emissions , which come from burning fossil fuel . They come from land use change , like cutting down forests for agriculture or to build housing developments , but the main thing is burning fossil fuels and that releases carbon dioxide , it releases methane , it releases nitrous oxides , and all of those different gases help trap heat on the planet , with carbon dioxide being the biggest contributor . The way that I like to talk about it for people who aren't as familiar with the concept is the reason that the earth is warm at all is because we have this blanket of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that help trap heat , and that's a good thing . But what we're doing is we are adding too much greenhouse gases to the atmosphere too quickly and that is increasing the thickness of the blanket Right , and so it's just trapping a lot more heat than what otherwise have been trapped
Urban Heat
Speaker 2.
Speaker 2And the number that I tell to people that's always shocking is the amount of extra energy heat energy that's been trapped on the planet since 1971 . Because of greenhouse gas emissions is about 381 zeta joules of energy , which I realize is not anything that anybody would understand , because nobody knows what a zeta joule is , but if you convert that into something more tangible . It's the equivalent of four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs exploding every second of every day since 1971 . And the amount of heat that's released from a nuclear explosion . You multiply that by four and that's how much extra heat has been trapped on the planet .
Speaker 1Every day .
Speaker 2Yeah , every second of every day since 1971 . It's a shocking number .
Speaker 1Can we dig a little bit further into urban heat and why cities themselves are maybe hotter than their surroundings ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so global warming is causing temperatures to rise all across the globe . But what has been noticed for a long time now this isn't sort of new revelation is that cities all around the globe they are getting hotter faster than moral areas , and that is because of something called the urban heat island effect , where the types of materials that we use to build cities and build the infrastructure for cities , they are actually very good at trapping heat . So asphalt right , asphalt is really good at trapping heat from the sun and then it re-radiates that heat out into the air all day and night as well . The nights are actually getting warmer faster than the daytime is . You know the types of buildings that we build . How tall are they ? How close are they together ? How much tree coverage do you have in like a downtown area ? All of these decisions that are made in terms of how we build cities , they contribute to how bad the urban heat island effect can get in a given place .
Speaker 1So you were recently involved in a heat mapping study that was conducted . Can you tell us more about that and the genesis of it and why a heat mapping study is important at all ?
Speaker 2Yeah , the federal government , through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . They've had a program , I think , for maybe six or seven years now , where they've been giving money to different cities around the country to try and map their heat in their city and which neighborhoods are hot , which neighborhoods are a little bit cooler , why that's the case , and then just basically helping cities gather data that they can use to reduce the threat of extreme heat in their cities , and so I was the leader of the Jacksonville version of this . We applied for funding at the end of 2021 , and then we got the funding and part of the funding came from the city as well that we carried out the study in the summer of 2022 , in June . We chose a day that we knew was going to be quite hot it was June 18th and what we did was we sent out volunteers in their cars across the city , across about 400 square miles of the city , so about half of the city , and those volunteers mounted these temperature sensors on the sides of their cars and the temperature sensors recorded the temperature , they recorded the humidity and they recorded the wind speed every second that they were operational , and these volunteers would drive their cars on specific routes through different neighborhoods . We have this data on a block by block basis .
Speaker 2Now for Jacksonville , which is really powerful for planning purposes . What we found is that the parts of the city that have less tree coverage , that have more asphalt , more commercial land , more industrial land and more big roadways like highways , those parts of the city are much hotter than neighborhoods that are more residential and have more tree coverage and less space dedicated to parking lots . So , like the hottest part of the city , one of the hottest parts of the city was downtown , right around City Hall , which shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody whereas cooler parts of the city were further south , on the south side , in San Marco and in San Jose , and getting out toward the beaches a little bit . But there were pockets of heat in various places around the city . And just to give you a sense of the temperature differential , the minimum temperature that we were recording was about 95 degrees on that day and the maximum temperature was about 116 . So that shows what a difference the urban heat island effect can make . That's a 20 degree Fahrenheit difference in temperature , which can be the difference between life and death during the middle of an extreme heat wave .
Speaker 2The reason we wanted to collect this data and give the city more of an insight into which neighborhoods are facing extreme heat risk is because it's a huge public health disaster waiting to happen . Heat is already the number one cause of death for people attributable to weather events . A lot of people might think that more people die during hurricanes or die during tornadoes or a flood or whatever it might be , but actually the number one killer of people is heat , and so if we have these parts of the city that are extremely hot , it's going to contribute to people's heat stress , it can lead to heat stroke , it can lead to emergency room visits and it can lead to death , tragically . So our goal in collecting some of this data was to give the city the information that it needed to hopefully make changes .
Speaker 1Given that now we have this data of what parts of the city are more affected by heat than others , or more prone to do these higher heat levels than others , what are the things that we can do with urban design ? I guess I'd like to understand both a technical perspective which you talked to a little bit , some of those things but then also from a policy perspective , what are the things that we can try to push our city council members or our mayor's office towards doing in order to improve the situation going forward ?
Speaker 2The great thing is that there's tons of solutions to these heat issues . Right , there's a lot of options out there for how we can tackle this . We just have to decide to do it and we have to put the money in place to fund these kinds of projects . And luckily the city is starting to do that . But so on the technical side of things , the one that people point to most often , is planting trees . Planting more trees , it's going to provide more shade and it's also going to help cool the air , because trees naturally cool the air through evapotranspiration , which is the fancy word for them , pulling water out of the ground and then allowing it to release through their leaves . But a key point on that , you know , people think , ok , we have to plant trees and so let's just plant as many trees as we can .
Speaker 2It's a little more complicated than that , because you have to plant the right trees in the right places , right , like here in Jacksonville , you know , for decades there's been a push to plant lots of palm trees because they look nice , they , you know , give kind of an exotic feel to the city and they're easy to maintain , relatively speaking . But palm trees provide almost no shade . They provide almost no cooling effect through evapotranspiration . They are pretty useless in that regard . So , you know , it's not like planting a bunch of palm trees is going to help . We need bigger you know broader canopy trees , oaks , maples , you know things that are going to provide more shade coverage , and so we need those kinds of trees and we need them to be maintained properly . They have to be cared for , at least specifically while they're young saplings , and they need the right amount of water and they need the right amount of space . So you have to do it in a specific way to have the biggest success from that .
Speaker 2Beyond tree planting , there's a bunch of things we can do in terms of landscape design across the city . There are rain gardens , there are bioswales . These are ways that you can specifically landscape a part of the city so that they help to trap more rainwater , rainwater and stormwater and they act as sort of wetlands , right , and wetlands are very good at cooling down the surrounding environment because there's , you know , a bunch of standing water there . So that's on the technical side of things , on the policy side of things that you were mentioning the big push there , and it's not like a sexy thing to talk about , right , like it's not like something people really like to focus on because it is kind of nitty gritty down in the weeds work .
Speaker 2But we need to update land use regulations . We need to update zoning regulations in the city , for example St John's Town Center . When the developers built St John's Town Center , I'm imagining because I'm not an expert on the zoning regulations that were in place at the time , but I'm imagining that there was no real requirement that the developers have a certain percentage of town center dedicated to green space . So updating zoning regulations to say , hey , if you're going to do a housing subdivision , if you're going to do another place like a St John's Town Center somewhere in Northeast Florida , you have to have a certain amount of land dedicated to tree coverage , dedicated to parks , dedicated to green space , like that has to be required , right , and that would force developers to make more urban heat friendly decisions .
Speaker 1I'd like to pivot from talking about design and what we can do to minimize urban heat in the future to talking about population health , and so we have to live with this for a certain period of time . So what are the things that we can do in order to protect our population , especially given the fact that there is such a big difference between certain neighborhoods in the heat that they're going to experience ? It seems to me , from looking at the map , that those neighborhoods that have a higher exposure to heat are also potentially more vulnerable . Can you explain that a little bit ?
Speaker 2Yeah , you're exactly right . The city needs to put more resources in towards and into helping people Deal with the current amount of heat and also the future heat that the city is going to be experiencing . We obviously want to be putting funding towards ameliorating the heat through all of the green infrastructure things I was just mentioning , but at the same time , there has to be funding for helping people to deal with the here and now threats that they're facing , and heat that's certainly one of them . So there's kind of two aspects to this . There's an education aspect and then there's an infrastructure aspect . The education aspect is just educating people across the city about Heat threats .
Speaker 2Most people don't think about Heat as something they need to be worried about , especially in Florida , because everybody knows that Florida is a hot place right , it's always been a hot place but people frequently don't realize how dangerous Extreme heat can be and how quickly it can lead to really bad tragedies . The city actually has a system of putting out these heat alerts . There's a free service that people can sign up for , and if you sign up for it , you get texts to your phone . The city will send out , you know , alerts that say hey , today is an extreme heat day , please take the necessary precautions . So we need to get more people signed up for services like that so they're aware of which days are the most threatening to them .
Speaker 2And then we need to educate people about how to keep themselves safe during these events , which means finding places that have reliable air conditioning , drinking lots of water , not working or playing Sports or spending a lot of time outside for long periods of time on these days , maybe going to a public pool or going to a splash pad with your kids or something to help everybody cool off .
Speaker 2So there's there's an educational aspect to it . And then the infrastructure aspect is making sure that all the things I just mentioned are available in the Neighborhoods that need it most . Right , we saw at this past summer Anybody who was paying attention to the news . You know the city has a system of public pools , but about half of the public pools were not an operation because they needed repairs and the city had not dedicated enough funding in past years to repair these pools so that they were functional . And so we were in the middle of this massive heat wave and there were certain neighborhoods that didn't have access to a public pool that should have been available . So that's the kind of infrastructure that that I'm talking about .
Speaker 1Thanks for listening . If you're enjoying the episode so far , please share the podcast with your friends and colleagues or , better yet , subscribe on your favorite podcast platform . Those are the best ways to support our efforts to highlight local sustainability stories . And now back to the show . I think we've covered urban heat
Addressing Climate Change
Speaker 1pretty well . I'd like to zoom back out now and Talk about carbon dioxide levels in general . So if CO2 levels in our atmosphere are the main cause of rising temperatures , what are the things that we can be doing to address it ?
Speaker 2There's a lot of things that we can do to address it , but the thing that we really need is we need to change the system that we are all living within , right , the economic system that we have built as a global human society over the past 250 years is a system that is dependent on fossil fuels , and we need to transition away from that system . And the the way that we can do that . Individuals can't make that happen right like through their own daily actions , but if we work together as groups to make sure that our leaders , our political leaders , are focused on that , then they can change the system Right . So the number one thing that anybody can do to help with the climate problem is to educate yourself about which politicians are Serious about confronting climate change , in which politicians are not serious about it , and then vote for those people who are serious . And just to give you an example of it , you know we had a the most landmark , consequential , largest Climate change legislation ever that our country passed was just passed in 2021 and that's the inflation reduction act . It put hundreds of billions of dollars towards enhancing solar energy production and also implementation wind energy , geothermal energy all of these things that we need to be transitioning to to get off of fossil fuels . We now have a lot more money available from the federal government to make it easier to make that transition , so voting is the number one thing that people can do To help the situation .
Speaker 2The second most important thing is to talk to other people about what's going on . We don't really talk about climate change enough as an issue . We need to be talking to our friends and our family about what's going on , because a lot of people just don't have the information . They don't understand really what's going on or they feel like they are ignorant about what's going on and so they don't want to , sort of like , stake out a viewpoint on it . Right , but the more we can talk about it publicly , the more people will feel comfortable thinking about it and trying to take action on it .
Speaker 2And then the last thing is individual choices . There are hundreds of individual choices we can make in our daily lives that can benefit the environment and benefit the climate change situation , and I'll just mention the most important ones . Eating less meat is important , especially eating less red meat . The reason for that is that cows and the cattle industry are shockingly big contributors to carbon dioxide emissions , for a variety of reasons that I won't get into . That's a big one . And then the other one is more obvious and it's driving less right Living in a neighborhood that you can walk to places or take public transportation . That goes a long way towards reducing our own personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think it's so important to understand the different options that you have in order to reduce your own personal carbon footprint , because reality is you're not going to be able to do all of them . You might be living in a neighborhood that really just isn't walkable , but maybe I can do something else that makes a difference . So there's not one specific prescription . That's right for everybody .
Speaker 2Yeah , and Jacksonville is a great example of that , because I would love to drive less , but I live in Jacksonville and Jacksonville is a driving city . It's a driving culture . That's how it's been built for the past 100 years . Right , and it's not any of our fault . That's just the way that it's happened over time and hopefully that's going to change in the future to a more public transportation-dominated city , but that's going to take decades to put that into practice .
Speaker 2So the other thing I always remind people of is don't get angry at yourself and don't beat yourself up about not being able to make every single lifestyle change that you would like to make , because sometimes it's just not possible . So the driving thing for me isn't something that I can really do at the moment , based on where I live or my kids go to school or I work . It's just not something I can really decrease , unfortunately . But what I can do , and what I have done , is I've changed my diet so that I'm not eating as much meat . I do composting in my backyard so that my vegetable and fruit scraps aren't ending up in landfills and creating methane emissions . There's a lot of different little things that we can all do and you have to pick and choose the ones that are right for you at this current time .
Speaker 1You mentioned the importance of talking about climate change . I've lived in several other parts of the country . I know you have to . I have found it easier to have climate change discussions in other parts of the country versus in Jacksonville . One of the things that enabled me to start having those conversations more was some data that I learned from you , which was what the general public actually thinks about climate change . How many people actually are concerned about it . Can you talk about that ?
Speaker 2Yeah , the majority of the country is concerned about climate change . It didn't used to be that way . This is data that comes from Yale University . They have an entire institute that tracks public opinion about climate change . They've been doing it for many years . They break it down on a zip code by zip code basis . You can really get granular data on this . But the majority of the country the majority of people in the country are concerned about climate change , recognize it as a threat . The thing that's interesting is that people recognize it as a threat , but a less than a majority of the country views it as a personal threat to them . The majority of people in Florida do think that it is impacting them , and that makes sense , because Florida is a place where we get affected by hurricanes and we get affected by flooding more than maybe some other parts of the country . The majority of people in Florida understand that we are being impacted right now by climate change , but not the majority of the country feels that same way .
Speaker 1That's interesting . I didn't know that about Florida . I didn't realize that Most people in Florida actually believe it's affecting them .
Speaker 2The place that's true of is Florida , and Louisiana has that as well because of all the hurricane they've faced over the years . I believe California because of the wildfire situation . I'm hopeful that that conversation is becoming easier to have .
Speaker 1It does feel like it's rapidly changing . I do notice a difference between now and even just one or two years . Like you said , adam , have you noticed a difference in perception based on generation , I guess ? I'm asking either if you are aware of any data that says that , or even anecdotally , what students that you interact with that you and F ?
Speaker 2Yeah , both of those things I mean there's definitely anecdotally
Concerns and Conversations About Climate Change
Speaker 2.
Speaker 2I teach college students every single day and we have , you know , all of my classes . We talk about climate change because it's impacting ecological systems , which is what I'm a professor of , and the conversations that we have are that students are concerned about it , they understand the threat . And then I asked them well , are you having conversations with you know , your friends and your family about these issues ? Because I talked to them about how talking about it is more is important , and they say yeah , a lot of them say yeah , I , you know , I've talked about this with my parents before , but my parents kind of laugh it off and say that it's not something they really want to think about or be worried about and they're not even sure that it's real right . So there's definitely , just from an anecdotal standpoint , there's definitely a generational divide there and the data bear that out as well . I should say . I mean , beyond my just personal anecdotal experience , there is data that shows that the younger generations of voters in this country are much more concerned about climate change .
Speaker 1Thank you very much , Adam . I appreciate your time . This has been a great conversation .
Speaker 2Yeah , thanks for having me , Lorian All right .
Speaker 1We hope you enjoyed today's episode . If you're interested in seeing how your neighborhood fared in the heat mapping study , you can check out the show notes on your favorite podcast platform or on our website , sustainablenorthfloridacom . We also have links to the database that shows perceptions on climate change at the county level . Thanks again to Dr Adam Rosenblatt for sharing his expertise with us today , and we'll leave you with one good thing . On Friday , february 9th , clean Air Northeast Florida is releasing the first comprehensive greenhouse gas inventory for our region . This is a good thing , because understanding where our greenhouse gas emissions come from is the first step in abating those emissions and moving towards a more sustainable economy .
