Planning urban parks to improve equity and resilience to hot-weather events in the Pacific Northwest

Keywords: planning, equity, climate, hot-weather, smart forests, mobility, smartphones, Pacific Northwest, Vancouver, Portland
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 1

Abstract

In June 2021 the Pacific Northwest experienced a “heat dome”: a climatic event which resulted in unprecedented temperatures across the region. This extreme heat event had significant environmental impact and caused hundreds of heat-related fatalities. Prior research has found that similar events have had a greater negative impact on low income communities. Our analysis aims to define and quantify the positive effects of cooling features in parks to identify how they serve high-risk populations. Various data sources, including remotely-sensed satellite imagery and census-derived population data, have been used to monitor social and ecological phenomena at urban and regional scales for decades. Yet these do not count visits to individual parks, nor take into account the varying socio-economic backgrounds of park users. Here we use a dataset collected from smartphone applications that count individual visits to parks in the Vancouver and Portland area. We combine these data with existing greeness data including Lidar and Landsat imagery to characterize grey and green cooling features in city spaces. We then model these data to understand associations between human use, socio-economic background, and patterns of access to specific park cooling features. Models will highlight opportunities to improve resilience to hot-weather events by identifying parks that are visited by people from a range of socioeconomic levels, that are in hotter areas of the city, but that do not have adequate canopy to provide shading. Such findings can support park planners in prioritizing management strategies for park design and cooling service allocation, to facilitate climate resilience.