Wealthy neighbourhoods with tree lined streets and large amounts of green space are significantly cooler than densely populated built-up areas that amplify the heat in the daytime and retain heat into the night experiencing what is called the urban heat island effect where low-income and ethnic minority families are concentrated. These same neighbourhoods are also exposed to much higher levels of air pollution.
Whilst wealthy families can retreat to their cool homes, private swimming pools and golf courses that remain well watered despite the widespread hosepipe bans, poorer families are told to stay away from the few parched trees in their neighbourhoods as they start to shed branches becoming a danger to those sitting under them. Lacking access to public swimming pools, with over 500 closed due to the last decade and a half of austerity, poor children seek respite from the heat in rivers, lakes and reservoirs risking drowning.
Heatwaves are not only deadly, they also impact all areas of our lives and livelihoods exacerbating the divide between the socially marginalised and the privileged. The response to heatwaves so far in the UK has been largely to leave people to privately adapt themselves whether through installing air conditioning in their homes or sponsoring tree planting in their local neighbourhoods. Air conditioning whilst very effective at cooling homes is expensive to install and run, largely limited to those who own their own homes, and works by exporting heat into the street and emissions into the atmosphere exacerbating both climate change and the urban heat island effect for those who do not have air conditioning. These carbon-intensive, privately hoarded cooling solutions are collectively maladaptive, allowing the wealthy to buy their way out of facing the impacts of climate change whilst simultaneously making the impacts of climate change worse for everyone else.
An alternative and more wholesome approach adapts to these conditions at a societal level, recognising the disparities in exposure and vulnerability to heat. Part of it is regulation:legally mandated maximum temperatures to protect workers, and building regulations and renters rights protections to compel landlords to adapt housing. The rest is investment in public services, embracing the ethos of private sufficiency coupled with public luxury, whilst designing adaptation, where possible, to carry net mitigation co-benefits. That means turning community spaces such as libraries and swimming pools into public cooling centres, shifting cooling from the private to the public sphere; building free, climate-controlled public and active transport to displace polluting private cars; investing in passive retrofitting, shading and communal low-carbon heating and cooling in schools, hospitals, care homes and social housing, following cities such as Paris and Geneva; and building more parks, lakes and rivers in the neighbourhoods where low-income and ethnic minority families live. This is a chance to revive the ambition that built the public baths, the free library movement and the public parks once opened so that working people in industrial cities could find air and shade, and to reverse a decade and a half of austerity that has closed hundreds of local libraries and public swimming pools. Regulation and passive retrofit can deliver large gains in both equity and carbon at modest cost; the bigger infrastructure would need serious investment, perhaps funded by the wealth taxes now gaining momentum, which would have the additional benefit of curtailing inequality.
