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| uOttawa heat mad art. |
Monday July 22nd might have been a wholly unmarkable day for you. It was a fairly hot day in a fairly hot month, which of course has been part of a fairly hot summer. If you live in this little part of the world, you might have noticed a lack of rain and a hint of smoke in the air from the forest fires in central and western Canada.
What you might not have known was that the record for the hottest recorded in human history was being set. Many news outlets reported on the record breaking temperature but it didn't get much coverage (the world has a lot of complicated things happening right now).
I think this kind of information tends to make people's eyes glaze over. "Oh yes, yet another time we broke the record for the hottest day..."
It seems to happen so often that people have become numb to the news.
This is problematic because the increase in temperature has a bunch of very serious and dangerous impacts to the natural environment and to people. Warmer temperatures can kill aquatic plants, disrupt the migratory paths of animals, mess up insect breeding patterns, and change the pattern of weather generally.
On the human side, warmer temperatures disrupt crops, make city spaces unbearably hot, and ultimately lead to an increase in heat related mortalities. You might not know this either but every year about 150,000 deaths are attributed to heatwaves. Not as big a number as cancer of respiratory diseases, but this number is raising sadly rising quickly.
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| uOttawa hazy sky due to wildfires |
So what can we do about this? Well the short answer is address climate change, but since that is a complicated issue, many institutions are embracing climate adaptation as a way to help control temperatures in urban spaces.
For those of you who don't know, climate adaptation is basically embracing the idea that the climate and changing and that there isn't much we can do about that in the short term. So climate adaptation is a strategy that deals with the consequences of a warming climate instead of trying to stop the climate from changing in the first place. This means dealing with heat, flooding, and insects (just to name a few).
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| uOttawa employees helping pull weeds in a pollinator garden |
Urban spaces are a key "battle zones" for climate warming because of the abundance of concrete surfaces (concrete is a cheap long-lasting material) and lack of green space (green spaces are often sacrificed for developed because they cheaper to develop).
Obviously, reducing concrete surfaces is the most direct approach. Concrete traps and radiates heat, while preventing water from getting into the soil thus contributing to flooding. But reducing concrete can sometimes be expensive and hard to do. Not to mention that fact that we do still need some hard surfaces for people to walk, cycle, and drive on. So alternatives like permeable concrete or asphalt have a role to play in reducing concrete.
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| Trees lining a walkway at uOttawa |
Another strategy is to increase vegetation like bushes and trees. Their roots help absorb water into the ground faster to prevent floods, and they cast shadows that provide shade and cool down a space. Recently, uOttawa prof Charles Brunette was able to demonstrate a 3 degree temperature difference with a handheld heat sensor; showing the difference in temperature at the tree covered Tabaret lawn vs the concrete space in front of the FSS building.
Increasing the amount of pedestrian specific space is also very important if you want to reduce temperatures. Cars and trucks create a lot of heat when they are in operation or even just idling. And if we are talking about internal combustion engines, there is the added challenge of the amount of emissions coming out of the tailpipe, making it more difficult to breathe on a hot day.
All these solutions sound easy enough as a one-off, but when you start trying to coordinate all these things together it gets tricky.
That's one of the reasons why uOttawa has adopted the Nature Positive Pledge, which commits the institution to supporting more nature based solutions. Gradually, you will see more and more prominent green spaces on campus helping to protect the campus from overheating.
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| A green roof at the Tabaret building at uOttawa |
If you are interested in learning more about the University of Ottawa's efforts to reduce the amount of heat on campus and reverse climate change, check out our website.
~jonathan rausseo - campus sustainability manager
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