Phoenix is in a desert and it's naturally hot here. On top of that,
we live in an urban heat island.
What we see is lack of shading in abundance of materials that absorb
heat and make that area hotter.
that they are dying from.
Air temperature here in Phoenix is not the main reason why people are feeling so
hot. It's actually the mean radiant temperature,
which is the heat load on the human body.
And it also includes the heat that's the metal from hot.
Surfaces. Make sure that it's level.
We're fully sun exposed, right? Yeah. Wow.
And air temperature is 93 degrees
Fahrenheit, but mean radiant temperature is
167 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's the,
the total heat load on your body when you're standing on this concrete surface
in the middle of the sun.
The urban heat island effect is where we have an area of built land,
not trees and not the same level of grass that we have in areas outside of city.
So even during the overnight hours,
temperatures don't drop as much as the areas around them.
Last year, we had 323 heat-related deaths here in Maricopa county.
And if you look at the last 20 years, you will see a huge curve.
Urban heat here in Phoenix affects everyone,
but it doesn't impact everyone quite the same way.
If you look at a map of the Phoenix Metro area,
you will see that the communities that have the highest
temperatures also have the lowest tree canopy cover
and the highest child poverty. For us here in Phoenix,
it's really about a lot of communities on the west side of the valley and
then on the Southern part,
all of those things are connected and to be able to really think of solutions as
we move forward,
we also need to be able to look back at our history and what some of those
decisions have been.
We're seeing that pattern from city to city,
to city where the areas that weren't represented as well,
don't have the trees, they don't have the grass,
they don't have the parks and they're getting hit worse.
What red lining is it's really just fencing off in area and really stamping it,
labeling it already as an area that is considered high risk of an investment.
And that's where Black and brown people were coerced or forced to live.
And just along this,
you can see the community just by the school that I teach in a community that
suffers from lacks of any shading. There's really hardly any tree canopy here.
Part of the work that I'd seen with our students now is they already understand
what systemic racism is. It's giving them that,
that terminology so that they can articulate it and advocate for themselves.
I like this one. You can see that they like put more desert ecology,
had a focus on cactuses on the Mesquite tree on re on
redesigning the real.
When we couple red lining with the urban heat island
impact, what it does to the community is lower their lifespan.
And so we're living in communities where, because of environmental racism,
because of the urban heat island effect here in this school, in this zip code,
or I teach the lifespan is 71.
I lost my mom at a young age, um, to lung cancer.
Then we don't know how she got it. She never smoked,
but could have been the carcinogens, the pollution in the air.
And it fuels my fire because my mom was very joyous person in many of
our community stuff from lung cancer, asthma. And when I got this information,
I began to understand, well, why did my mom pass away from lung cancer?
Why were we pushed out? Why were we displaced?
Why did I grew up living community to community?
Those are the stories from my own lived experience that I carry with me in the
work that I do.
The community greenings that we've been focused on,
have been in these communities that are disproportionally impacted by heat.
We try to increase trees and vegetations,
and these areas that have been identified as hotspots,
but they're also a great way to raise awareness.
The big message that we are trying to communicate to these communities is that
there are things that can be done and that nature can play a really important
role.
We are so far along with our changing climate and we need actions on a global
scale, a federal scale and a state and local scale.
And the way climate change plays out is really different from location to
location. So those people on the ground are going to know how to help their
community best.
All of these cascading effects that we get from increased heat are affecting
so many things, our health, our air that we breathe,
just how we function in a normal society.