Keeping Cities Cool in a Warmer Future
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为什么 can .

can you wanna outside？

你说 什么？

Okay, honey, well, i'd like you, but it's it's very, very hot.

John amount is a water street journal reporter based in singapore. He says, overall, he likes living there. But one thing he's had to learn to grapple with, it's really hot.

This is just another morning in singapore. It's ten I am is already sweltering. The humanity kind of crazy were sweating like crazy. And when you just stepped outside a minute of goal in the .

five years he's lived there, john has noticed that it's just gotten hotter. He has to plan his day, went to walk his dog when, to take his kid to the playground around when it's cool enough .

to be outside feels a little bit like we're living on Venus and just trying to find the hours in the day when the clouds come out, the sun goes away or a breeze starts up, that we can rush out and get our kids a little exercise and a little heavy sunlight.

Located about one degree north of the equator, singapore has a total area of only two hundred seventy eight square miles, slade, smaller than york city, five burs. But nearly six million people live on that land, making singapore the second density country on earth. And it's not just john who's feeling the heat.

Singapore is warming at twice the global average, according to that country's meteorological service. So even though singapore is a country and a city state, it's got a lot of the same problems that cities do. Heat can have an outsized impact on cities.

That bad news for an increasingly urban population living in a warming world. Today, more than half of the people in the world live in cities to the united nations. That number is expected to rise to sixty eight percent by twenty fifty. As temperatures rise, more urban IOS may see their days looking a lot more like jos.

So we just arrived at the playground, which is it's a bit cloudy now. So I think it's okay to be outside. There is nobody else at the playground now.

Now cities are paying attention to the problem of heat. Some, including singapore, are putting initiatives into place to make you feel cooler to be outside, but can not be enough to truly make a difference from the wall street journal. This is the future of everything.

I'm our social today. We're talking about how to keep the cool as the climate changes will look at how a digital version of singapore is helping to test cooling efforts and how other places may follow its lead in the future. Stay with us.

How do you start to lay the foundation for responsible AI in your organization? Here's fator binder's, IBM consultants. Later, for trust.

or the A I IT starts with asking the question, what is the kind of relationship that we ultimately want to with A I the purpose of A I is not meant to display human beings that meant to be intelligent. Soon, as you have a glimmer in your eye about how you're thinking, you might want to use A I then asking the questions like, what would be required in order to earn people's trust in such a model.

No matter where you live, chances are twenty twenty three was a bit warmer than usual.

We've been mentioning .

this .

and know you .

felt at the last few .

days there has been a long .

hot street that .

we've been on a third of americans that's around one hundred and thirteen million people a currently under heat advice, some authorities are warning that the temperatures could be deadly.

Twenty twenty three was the hottest year on record by a long shot. Europe's top climate agency released data today showing global temperatures average one point four eight degrees secs or two point six six degrees fair and high above preindustrial levels.

This year may be similar. Just last month, delhi, india, saw record breaking temperatures near one hundred twenty two degrees fairing height. There are a few reasons why cities feel the heat more than their world neighbors. A big one is something called the urban heat island effect. Sara muro and associates, professor in the school of geographical sciences and urban planning at arizona state university, explains how IT works.

The urban heat, the island effect, is a phenomenon where urban areas are hotter than the surrounding or natural areas, sometimes by multiple degrees. The built environment contributes to the urban heat island because is things like pavement and buildings, actually absorb and retain more heat. And then all of the activities in the city, everything from cars driving, factories running, air conditioners running at such a, all of those released what's called the whistle heat. And that also warms the surroundings.

SHE says. That means that as the planet has warmed since the late eighteen hundred ds cities have felt the .

effects more acutely, the earth has already warmed. Basically one degree sales overall. This doesn't sound like that, but even a very small shift in global average temperatures can actually translate into a really big change. And so in cities were really gonna see increases in the length of the heat and in the intensity of heat waves and the likelihood that we have these really extreme heat waves in places that we're not used to dealing with heat as a problem that .

has big implications for public health. The centers for disease control and prevention estimates that every year about one thousand, two hundred people in the U. S. Died because of extreme heat.

Heat is one of the deadliest weather and climate related hazards. This is the most obvious effect that people are really worried about, but there's many more times as many heat related illness nesses or people are having to seek out medical attention due to heat.

He also says that heat has affect on other things you might not expect, like education, infrastructure, economies and ecosystems. So cities are making heat a higher priority. One such city state is singapore.

In singapore, with no stranger to heat that always been hot. But when you walk around the constituency, especially old residents, they would just tell you that it's getting hotter, even the evenings were previously. Maybe switching on a fan or just leaving the windows open would be enough. I think increasingly, more people are feeling that we need conditioning on even at night.

That's hunting rule. A member of singapore s parliament back in february, SHE made a speech to parliament saying that the government needs to do more to address the problem of heat.

While we cannot, on our own, stop the client from getting hotter, we can reduce the impact global warming hairs on the immediate environment around us. Reducing this impact is not just a matter what is nice to do. IT is a must do to .

hear her tell IT. There are pressing reasons why the government needs to take action. Now the faster rate at which singapore is warming compared to the rest of the world doesn't just mean higher electric bills and more emissions.

Singapore ants are known for being extremely pram tic and practical. There are some projections that will be released recently that show that by the year twenty thirty five, heat in general is expected to cost our economy two point three billion dollars yearly in terms of lots productivity.

In practice, he says that lost productivity means things like construction workers who can go to job sites because it's too hot. IT means worse quality sleep, which can exacerbate chronic health conditions. And in general, heat affects vulnerable populations, the poor, the elderly, more than others.

So when I visit my residents, sometimes we ask them, you know, say anything I can do for you, and more than once to come back. So, well, unless you can make IT cooler and know what is nothing.

making a cooler is actually not such a wild idea. Government initiatives are aimed at mitigating the heat, and there's a research project focused on making a complex digital representation of singapore to test more of those efforts before they are put into effect more after the break.

So singapore is hot, and data shows it's likely to get hotter in the future. The city state is already doing some things to mitigate how hot IT feels to be outside. For decades, it's been a government priority to plant trees and gardens, whatever possible, including on the roofs of buildings, in part to increase the amount of shade and lower the surrounding temperature.

Now the government is in the process of planting another one million, which IT plans to complete by twenty thirty. Separately, there is a pilot program to see whether heat reflective paint would keep buildings cooler. New neighborhoods are being designed to enhance the effect of wind moving through the buildings, and a government push for electric vehicles to replace combustion engines in the coming years could both curb carbon emissions and reduce the amount of exhaust that make feel hotter. But there's an ambitious research project that could help officials and others find the most effective heat mitigation strategies and be confident to work.

While the goal of the coating singapore two point zero is to develop uh digital urban climate twins. So A B A representation of singapore, which allows to evaluate certain measures, we can improve the urban heat in singapore that .

Christina or honey, the lead principal investigator for the cooling singapore project IT, brings together researchers connected with mi t, the university of cambridge and other schools, including E, T, H. Eric, a university based in switzerland under society, works with ora honey as the project manager for cooling singapore, and he says that singapore is of interested in international institutions for .

a few big reasons. It's important in singapore, priority, strong governance and they there.

Here's how the digital twin works. Imagine a digital representation of a city like you might see on google maps. Let's say it's got all the buildings and streets represented, but it's also got overlays of so much other data.

We have data on traffic, basically the whole road network, but also how traffic patterns are evolving. We have climatic data usually coming from different weather stations, electricity demand data, land use state on veto, like where are trees placed, what types of trees?

This is complicated to put together, the researchers say, but it's worth IT if the government wanted to see, for example, whether putting in a new park could help neighborhood feel cooler, they could get answers .

to questions like, where do we place parks? What is the impact of parks? How far a way do you have to beat that? You still feel the impact.

And that's not just on the scale of a single district, but how these measures could affect the whole city state. Or honey and socia say a model like this is not only useful for governments figuring out what initiatives to implement, but also to the private sector people like architects, developers and urban planners. The researchers say they're close to finishing a prototype of the digital twin to be made available to all of these stakeholders, but the work may never be done. Cities are always changing, so updating the model to reflect those changes mean there will always be work to do.

New use cases come in, software and models keep developing, so we might not be able to free shit ever somehow.

but the models may get Better in the future right now. So sia says IT can take a few days to run a particular simulation, and even that can only go down to a certain level of granularity, about one and a half square miles. But with the help of more real time data and artificial intelligence models, future versions of a digital twin could be more nip and more accurate, down to individual blocks and buildings.

Other future uses for digital twins could include planning for extreme weather, like simulating flooding or figuring out where to put a cooling center during a heat wave. The cooling singapore researchers are also looking at how their methods for making a digital twin could work for other cities that may be necessary because heat mitigation strategies don't work the same way in every place. I asked ora honey e, if the same techniques to call singapore would work. For example, in dubai.

singapore, very humid, which may be to buy, is not the case. So there then also certain interventions have done also a different impact, probably planting trees in dubai also difficult because there is not enough water. So every city comes with its boundary conditions.

The researchers say they're having conversations with several other cities about starting up projects there, but they wouldn't say which other places beyond singapore are already taking heat seriously and are implementing heat mitigation efforts. Phoenix, the fifth biggest city in the U. S. With one point six million residents, is one such city. Phoenix mayor kate guy ago told me how he thinks about heat in the city.

Phoenix economy is built on part on being Sunny that comes with a very hot summer, and we can have temperatures above a hundred for extended periods of time. So we need to think about how to make the city more comfortable, but also so safer, particularly for those who are most vulnerable.

In twenty twenty one, feenix became one of the first us. Cities to create a publicly funded office for heat mitigation. The department's job is to figure out how to address urban heat in the short term, like, say, during a heat wave, and come up with longer term mitigation strategies.

But still, heat is taking a toll in two thousand twenty three heat LED to six hundred forty five deaths in maracota conney, where phoenix is located. That's the highest ever and a nearly seven hundred fifty percent increase from ten years ago. Fenix mar gago said that these were tragic and often preventable deaths and that the city is honing its strategy ahead of this summer to mitigate some of that heat.

Gago says the city is using trees and art projects to increase the shade cover is also using a letter colored silent on roads to reflect some of the heat that would otherwise be absorbed into black asphalt, SHE says. A lot of these ideas come from collaborations with universities and entrepreneurs, but to researchers like our onic. It's clear that there isn't just one approach that will work to make cities feel cooler.

We sometimes see if we change something. For example, if you planned a couple of trees, you see an intervention has an impact of zero point one degree, which is not a lot. So one mention is also very difficult to to have A A large impact.

Hurting rule, the indian politician agrees. It's gna take a bunch of efforts together to keep cities feeling livable as temperatures rise.

Focusing on urban design alone is really not going to be enough for sure. IT forms an important part, you know. But you really do need to look at the more underlying issues of how your city is structured and don't be afraid to look outside of the box. Don't be too focus on the traditional solutions are, I think.

IT urn and even though it's already so hot in places like singapore and phoenix or honey x says it's not too late for mitigation efforts to have a real impact.

I mean, it's the same with climate change. We have to feeling we are too late. But the only thing what we can do is basically try to be as fast as possible, we finding solutions. And I think that's the same as for the urban heats. We have to work on those solutions and try to be fast implementing that so that singapore and other cities remain livable at the end.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal soph anie. Alcan fruit is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me alexo.

So additional reporting in this episode from john e. Mont, our fact checker is a partner of a thing. Michael level and Jessica fenton, our sound designers, and rote, our theme music. Cathy milsom is our supervising producer. We had helped from section editor dma island, I shall all muslim is our development producer Scott solway and Christianly are the deputy editors, and philon to patterson is the head of news audio for the wall, strict journal like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks .

for listening.

Earlier, we discuss what responsible A I looks like in practice. Here's fator point, endorse from IBM consulting again on why that begins with data.

My favorite definition of the word date up. It's an architecture common experience. A I is like a mirror that reflects our biases back towards us.

But we have to be brave enough, an introspective enough, to look into the mirror and decide, does this reflection actually alive to my organization? Values, if IT aligns, be transparent about? Why did you pick the data that you did? If IT doesn't like that, when you know you need to change your entire approach.

learn more about IBM artificial intelligence consulting services and IBM outcome splash consulting.