Climate Change, Urbanization Towards a More Resilient Phoenix: How One Desert City is Tackling Extreme Heat Challenges

Kate Gallego is the Mayor of Phoenix, Arizona. This article derives from one written for the 2023 Perry World House Global Shifts Colloquium, “Living with Extreme Heat: Our Shared Future.”

Phoenix is the fifth-largest and fastest-growing big city in the US, with an ambitious vision to become the most sustainable desert city on the planet. Located in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, heat is a fact of life for Phoenicians – people are more likely to carry gloves to protect their hands from hot steering wheels in the summer than cold in the winter. A balance between the sometimes competing priorities of cooling solutions and water conservation necessitates a unique and innovative framework of heat response and mitigation strategies.

Though the Valley of the Sun has been inhabited for millennia, climate change has exacerbated summer heat extremes. The impacts of increasing temperatures on public health and quality of life are, in turn, exacerbated by urban development patterns and compounding risk factors. Protecting the quality of life of Phoenicians requires a robust public health approach, as well as creative deployment of cooling strategies to improve our built environment. That’s why I led the creation of the City of Phoenix Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, the first publicly funded heat office in the country, to ensure a full-time focus on heat issues and coordination inter-departmentally and with community stakeholders.

A comprehensive approach demands strategies for immediate extreme heat response to protect our most vulnerable residents, mid-long-term strategies to make our communities cooler, and strategies to reduce our impact on the climate by pursuing net-zero emissions.

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