UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Benjamin Hobbs, the Theodore M. and Kay W. Schad Professor of Environmental Management; Rui Shi, doctoral student; and Ali Eyni, doctoral student, all at Johns Hopkins University, will give the talk, “City-HEAT (Heat Equity Adaptation Tool): A multi-objective, uncertainty-based planning framework for urban heat adaptation and management,” at 4 p.m. on Monday, March 18, in 112 Walker Building on the University Park campus. Talk will also be available via Zoom.
“Rising global temperatures and the urban heat island effect can amplify heat-related health risks to urban residents,” Hobbs said. “Cities are considering various heat adaptation actions to improve public health, enhance social equity and cope with future conditions beyond past experience. We will discuss the City-Heat Equity Adaptation Tool (City-HEAT) that suggests optimal investments for mitigating urban heat and reducing health impacts through modifications of the built and natural environments, and reductions of human heat exposure, can be achieved.”
The team will share how City-HEAT considers multiple public health and social objectives under a wide range of future scenarios. In an application to Baltimore, Maryland, the team will demonstrate how City-HEAT can generate efficient multi-year heat adaptation plans. They will talk about how they quantified the effectiveness-efficiency-equity tradeoffs among alternative plans and show the advantages of flexible decision-making. They will talk about how City-HEAT can be adapted to the natural, built and social environments of other cities to support their urban heat adaptation planning, recognizing local objectives and uncertainty.
Hobbs, who has been on the Johns Hopkins faculty from 1995, uses systems analysis and economics to improve electric utility planning, operations and policy, as well as management of environmental and water resources systems. He earned his doctorate from Cornell University. Shi is a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins and Eyni is a doctoral student in Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins.
The talk is part of the EarthTalks spring 2024 series, “Urban Systems Science,” which is exploring complex urban systems including interactions between tightly connected human and natural systems both within city boundaries and between cities and the surrounding rural environment. For more information about the spring 2024 series, visit the EarthTalks website.