City-HEAT: A Multi-objective, Uncertainty-based Planning Framework for Urban Heat Management

Rising global temperatures and the urban heat island effect can amplify heat-related health risks to urban residents. Cities are considering various heat adaptation actions to improve public health, enhance social equity, and cope with future conditions beyond past experience. We present the City-Heat Equity Adaptation Tool (City-HEAT), which suggests optimal investments for mitigating urban heat and reducing health impacts through modifications of built (cool roofs/pavements) and natural (urban afforestation) environments and reductions of people’s heat exposure (cooling centers). The optimization considers multiple public health and social objectives under a wide range of future scenarios. An application to Baltimore, MD (USA) demonstrates how City-HEAT can generate Pareto-efficient multi-year heat adaptation plans. We quantify effectiveness-efficiency-equity tradeoffs among alternative plans and show the advantages of flexible decision-making. City-HEAT can be adapted to the natural, built, and social environments of other cities to support their urban heat adaptation planning, recognizing local objectives and uncertainty.
Benjamin Hobbs earned his PhD from Cornell University. He has been at JHU since 1995 in what is now the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering, and was previously on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University and a staff researcher at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Labs (US). This year, he was on sabbatical at FSR (fsr.eui.eu/); he has had previous sabbaticals at University of Washington, CalTech, Comillas Pontifical University, and the Netherlands Energy Research Center, and he has also been an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College in Cambridge University. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of INFORMS, and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from President Reagan. He is a member of the State of Maryland's (Climate) Mitigation Work Group and vice-chair of that state’s Air Quality Control Advisory Council. He has been a member of the California power market’s surveillance committee since 2002, and now serves as its chair. From 1995-2002, he was a consultant to the Office of the Economic Advisor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Dr. Hobbs leads EPICS, a NSF Global Climate center within the JHU Robert O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute on managing renewable-dominated power systems. This center is a collaboration with Imperial College, University of Melbourne, CSIRO, Georgia Tech, Resources for the Future, and UC Davis. Dr. Hobbs also participates in the Baltimore Socio-Environmental Collaborative 21cc.jhu.edu/b..., a large EPA-funded project to support climate adaptation in that city, with City-HEAT being a key tool for organizing and communicating information on heat management strategies.