3 Steps On Extreme Heat Every City Should Take
Better governance, stronger partnerships and a solid action plan are key to protecting residents from soaring temperatures, this heat resilience expert says.
People cool themselves with water bottles during the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 2026, as a heat wave stretching from the Midwest to the East Coast affected as many as 90 million U.S. residents.
Alex Wong via Getty Images
The U.S. is in a “heatshed moment,” says Ladd Keith, director of the University of Arizona’s Heat Resilience Institute: “a critical turning point in which heat must be rapidly addressed to protect health and livelihoods worldwide,” he wrote in a Journal of Urban Affairs commentary in April.
“Our cities were built for a climate that no longer exists,” Keith said in a recent interview with Smart Cities Dive. “Cities aren’t ready for the heat we’re experiencing this year, and they won’t be ready for the heat that we experience in a decade from now. We really need to move more quickly to retrofit our cities and adapt them for the climate that we will be experiencing in the future and that we’re already experiencing right now.”
SMART CITIES DIVE: You’ve said extreme heat is an invisible issue. Are city officials starting to understand its importance?
LADD KEITH: 100%. I’ve been working on extreme heat for over 15 years, and it wasn’t until 2021 or so, with the Pacific Northwest heatwave in America, that cities started taking it seriously.
Why does heat get less policy attention than floods, hurricanes and wildfires?
Those other hazards do harm to human life — obviously quite a lot — but they also harm property. In the United States, we care a lot about property and infrastructure. We have insurance; we have lots of money tied up in those things. And unfortunately, it seems, based on the money that we spend, that we care a little bit less about human life and quality of life and health.
Are cities making meaningful progress on heat resilience?
If you looked at the United States 10 years ago, most governments didn’t recognize heat as something they even had the authority or responsibility to address. And there were very few resources for communities to address extreme heat. There weren’t guidebooks, there weren’t toolkits like the Climate Mayor’s Toolkit. If you were interested in addressing extreme heat, you had to just go it alone. Today there’s much more awareness about it. Communities are interested in addressing it. There’s more public support and public desire to address extreme heat. So, in those ways, we’ve come a long way.
What hasn’t really followed is sustainable funding sources. With the federal government’s new priorities, a lot of the progress that we did make over the last couple of years has been pulled back. That will certainly harm our efforts going forward because we’re already behind where we should be for addressing a climate risk like extreme heat.
Which cities are setting the standard?
I’m in the city of Tucson, and we’ve been holding urban heat island workshops for 15 years. We have the longest-running publicly accessible urban heat island map from our Pima Association of Governments. And we adopted the state’s first heat action road map three years ago. So, I think the city of Tucson is doing a great job.
But then you look at Phoenix, which is obviously the hottest American city of its size, and they have the nation’s only publicly funded office of heat mitigation and response, which is an interesting innovation and experiment to see if that’s an effective way to address extreme heat.
Boston had one of the earlier heat action plans and has done a pretty good job greening itself. There are lots of good examples from across the United States of places that are trying to make a difference.