Heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States, and housing characteristics affect heat-related mortality. This paper answers two questions. First, how do heat risk measures vary by housing type and location in San José, California? Second, what housing and neighborhood factors are associated with greater heat risk? We first create a parcel dataset with housing, heat risk, and neighborhood characteristics. We then use a combination of descriptive statistics, exploratory mapping, and linear regression models to analyze associations between housing, neighborhoods, and heat risk. The results indicate that households of different housing types face varying degrees of heat risk, and the largest disparities are between detached single-family (lowest heat risk) and multifamily rental (highest heat risk). Air conditioning availability is a major contributing factor: the probability of not having central air conditioning is much lower for detached single-family (44.9%) compared with multifamily rental (73.7%). There are also heat risk disparities for households in neighborhoods with larger proportions of Hispanic and Asian residents. This research demonstrates the need to understand heat risk at the parcel scale and suggests to policymakers the importance of heat mitigation strategies that focus on multifamily rental housing and communities of color.

State and local public health agencies are at the forefront of planning and responding to the health challenges of climate hazards but face substantial barriers to effective climate and health adaptation amidst concurrent environmental and public health crises. To ensure successful adaptation, it is necessary to understand and overcome these barriers. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Climate-Ready States and Cities Initiative (CRSCI) provides funding to state and local health departments to anticipate and respond to health impacts from climate change using the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) framework. This paper explores the barriers to and enablers of successful adaptation projects among BRACE West CRSCI grantees, including Arizona, California, Oregon, and the city and county of San Francisco. The barriers included competing demands such as the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on partners with similar challenges, staff and leadership turnover, uncertain and complex impacts on at-risk populations, and inadequate resources. The enablers included effective partnerships, leadership support, dedicated and skilled internal staff, and policy windows enabling institutional change and reprioritization. These findings highlight effective strategies in the field that state and local health departments may use to anticipate potential barriers and establish their work in an environment conducive to successful adaptation.

Indoor residential environments will be an increasing source of dangerous heat exposure as summer temperatures rise. Although air conditioning is a recognized preventative measure, many vulnerable ...

Cities account for over 66% of global energy use and with over 68% of the population expected to live in urbanized areas by 2050, anthropogenic urban heat release is likely to become one of the most significant contributors to the creation of urban microclimates. In the present work, an open-source framework for one-way upstream coupled multiscale urban thermal environment simulations is examined and validated and can provide valuable insights about the flow behavior and energy transport between spatial scales. In this study, a city-wide multiscale model with over 500,000 building, road, and tree canopy data points parameterizing Atlanta, GA as a digital twin is developed and validated with a spatial scale of 5 m. The validated model is used to perform a parametric study on the implications bulk surface albedo (SA) has on the city's anthropogenic heat (AH) release in terms of heat flux. The study demonstrates that anthropogenic heat flux for building waste energy accounts for a small part of the total surface heat flux, and a detailed understanding of the components of urban heat (particularly with respect to total surface heat flux) is required to predict and simulate an urban thermal environment.