News location:

Canberra Today 18°/23° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

The council’s hot to trot on tackling urban heat

QPRC sustainability project officer Cameron Pensini… “We are going to test out tree species to see which ones cope with heat best.” Photo: Belinda Strahorn

QUEANBEYAN is leading the way to “beating the heat in the burbs” with an ambitious new plan to tackle urban heat.

Climate-change projections show Queanbeyan is likely to experience 12 more days a year over 35C by 2070.

Heat mapping technology is detecting “severe” heat pockets across the CBD, so Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council’s (QPRC) “urban vegetation and heat adaptation strategy” is a new approach to keeping cool, inevitably helping the region prepare for a hotter future.

Funded through the NSW government’s Increasing Resilience to Climate Change Fund, stage one of the $46,000 strategy involved heat mapping of council’s four major urban centres: Queanbeyan, Braidwood, Bungendore and Googong.

The council’s sustainability project officer, Cameron Pensini, said more than 90 per cent of Googong, Queanbeyan and Bungendore recorded significant pockets of heat and fell within an “urban heat island”.

“In this case, an urban heat island was an area that recorded two degrees warmer than the natural area surrounding it,” Mr Pensini said.

Urban heat islands occur when cities replace natural land cover with dense concentrations of pavement, buildings and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat.

While experts have known for some time that urban areas are warmer than the surrounding natural landscape, the effect has not been widely seen as a significant one.

Figuring out how to counteract the “urban heat island” effect, as the phenomenon is dubbed, was more important than ever, Mr Pensini said.

“Looking into surface heat, in particular urban heat islands, is of critical importance to towns and cities due to its impact upon human health and comfort, increasing energy consumption and associated emissions and impairing water quality,” Mr Pensini said.

“Severe” heat islands which are over four degrees warmer than natural areas were detected in Googong, which recorded the largest build-up of severe heat (75 per cent), followed by Queanbeyan (64 per cent) and Bungendore (58 per cent). 

“Googong was to be expected to be high because it is a new suburb and hasn’t had time to build up shade canopies, Queanbeyan and Bungendore came down to the lack of vegetation and heat-absorbing materials in those areas,” said Mr Pensini.

Braidwood had the smallest pocket of heat with just nine per cent recorded.

“Braidwood generally has less built-up areas than our other urban centres as well as established tree canopy cover, which has made it nearly as equally cool as our natural areas such as the Tallaganda National Park,” Mr Pensini said. 

The solution, Mr Pensini said, was creating “cool” suburbs, and that could be achieved through planting more trees and cooling infrastructure.

“It’s all about being smarter with how we go about planting trees and how we design our homes and buildings to make sure we have enough space for trees as well as selecting appropriate materials such as lighter-coloured roofs,” said Mr Pensini.

“It’s also up to the council to think how we can cool the CBD and suburban areas again through more plantings and irrigation and through things like permeable pavements that allow water to infiltrate and cool down the surfaces themselves and aid in evaporative cooling.”

Mr Pensini said stage two of the council’s plan involved developing an urban forest strategy.

“As part of the urban forest strategy we are going to do percentage tree canopy cover mapping and then we will probably develop a draft tree canopy cover target for the local government area,” he said.

“We are also going to test out tree species to see which ones cope with heat best; silver birch trees, which are planted around our urban areas, are not great, they suffer during drought and hot conditions, so we are trying to have a list of more suitable trees to plant like casuarinas or certain oak trees.” 

QPRC’s urban forest strategy is expected to be completed by December.

 

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Belinda Strahorn

Belinda Strahorn

Share this

One Response to The council’s hot to trot on tackling urban heat

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews