Data tools can help city planners perform an analysis of costs and benefits to test the impact of smart surfaces on their city.
Photo by Anna Frank, courtesy iStockphoto
One tool helps city planners “understand on a lifecycle basis how much more beneficial it is to choose the smart surface option.”
— Jacob Miller
U.S. cities that want to reduce urban heat and protect residents can access a suite of data-driven, web-based tools that show the return on investment in smart surfaces. The information can help advocates craft policies to make smart surfaces a reality in their community.
The tools are available thanks to the Smart Surfaces Coalition, a group of organizations working to advance health in the face of climate change through better urban design. Smart surfaces include tools such as cool roofs, porous surfaces, trees and foliage.
Planners are taking advantage of the coalition's benefit-cost analysis tool, which allows users to see the impact adopting smart surfaces could have on their cities. If a proposal called for adopting cool roofs on city buildings, for example, the tool would take into account baseline heat exposure and expected drops in temperature and calculate financial benefits.
“This tool helps them understand on a lifecycle basis how much more beneficial it is to choose the smart surface option, whether that's because that smart surface lasts longer or provides a host of benefits associated with energy savings,” Jacob Miller, a coalition senior project manager, told The Nation's Health.
Tool users can also break out human health benefits, such as the number of lives saved from lowering hot temperatures and air pollution emissions. In Baltimore, the coalition used the tool to find that city-wide adoption of smart surfaces could lower peak summer temperatures by 4.3 degrees in the city's hottest areas, with benefits outweighing costs 15-fold.
The findings drove city leaders to advance smart surface adoption, “including a cool roof ordinance, a study to implement urban meadows on a hundred acres of land in Baltimore, some protections for trees and a number of other initiatives that they're working on,” Miller said. “Baltimore is really becoming, as a result, a smart surfaces city.”
Signed into law in 2023, Baltimore's cool roof ordinance is one of nearly 2,000 policy documents searchable in the Smart Surfaces Coalition's policy tracker, another tool available to planners.
A project of the coalition and Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the tracker tool gives users a database to search laws, building codes and regulations across 50 states. Users can also drill down on specific goals, such as reducing extreme heat and managing stormwater, said Daniel Metzger, JD, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center.
“A city that doesn't have a stormwater fee in place can find examples of the specific language that's been enacted in many other cities and copy that or adapt that to their particular case,” Metzger told The Nation's Health. “Having precedent to work from is, I think, the No. 1 use case.”
In addition, the tool's website has a best practices tab and glossary of key terms for people unfamiliar with smart surfaces.
“The single largest piece of feedback that we got was saying it's helpful to see everything that's out there, but it would be even more helpful to be guided to which of these examples we should be following if we can,” Metzger said.
A third tool from the Smart Surfaces Coalition helps users determine where smart surface infrastructure would have the most impact. Developed in partnership with the Trust for Public Land, the decision support tool maps data on tree canopy, air temperature and summer ground- surface temperatures. Users can also use the data to create and export reports, said Dale Watt, a GIS project manager for the Trust for Public Land.
For example, users can look at demographics, economic conditions and the amount of tree canopy in census tracts and compare the impact smart surface interventions would make, Watt told The Nation's Health.
The tools work together to advance smart surface adoption.
“If you look at the benefit-cost analysis tool and determine there's tremendous health and economic savings available from cool roofs, the decision support tool can tell you where to maximize those benefits, and the policy tracker tells you ‘Here are a hundred different approaches to actually implement this and make it happen,’” Metzger said.
For more information, visit www.smartsurfacespolicy.org/policies and www.smartsurfacescoalition.org/tools.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
