Abstract
Heat vulnerability of urban populations is becoming a major issue of concern with climate change, particularly in the cities of the Southwest United States. In this article we discuss the importance of understanding coupled social and technical systems, how they constitute one another, and how they form the conditions and circumstances in which people experience heat. We discuss the particular situation of Los Angeles and Maricopa Counties, their urban form and the electric grid. We show how vulnerable populations are created by virtue of the age and construction of buildings, the morphology of roads and distribution of buildings on the landscape. Further, the regulatory infrastructure of electricity generation and distribution also contributes to creating differential vulnerability. We contribute to a better understanding of the importance of sociotechnical systems. Social infrastructure includes codes, conventions, rules and regulations; technical systems are the hard systems of pipes, wires, buildings, roads, and power plants. These interact to create lock-in that is an obstacle to addressing issues such as urban heat stress in a novel and equitable manner.
Highlights
Heat vulnerability of urban populations is becoming a major issue of concern including in the American Southwest, where extreme heat events are forecast to increase significantly under climate change in the coming century [1]
Power systems, developed largely in the 20th century, tend to rely on centralized power plants, like natural gas or coal fired power plants, or dams. They are part of an energy grid, regulated by a complex set of institutions that, in the U.S include federal agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which sets the rates and service standards for most bulk power transmission, licenses both hydro and nuclear power plants and enforces reliability standards developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)
This research is useful in helping frame questions such as climate vulnerability and how it is manifest in specific regions like the U.S Southwest
Summary
Heat vulnerability of urban populations is becoming a major issue of concern including in the American Southwest, where extreme heat events are forecast to increase significantly under climate change in the coming century [1]. The impacts from heat on urban populations are, in many ways, artifacts of technical systems, such as building thermal characteristics, availability of affordable and reliable electricity, the characteristics of physical surfaces, parks and greening, and overall, urban morphology, nested within the larger electric grid system These hard infrastructures are a result of, and, in turn, affect the soft infrastructures of regulation, codes, conventions, real estate markets, and more—including more intangible infrastructures such as social networks. It is evident that frequent extreme heat events [50] will exacerbate extreme heat degree-days in the U.S, and especially in the southwest and will negatively impact the effectiveness of the grid itself This is because roughly 68% of California’s and 93% of Arizona’s electricity is generated from water-intense fuel sources, including coal, natural gas and nuclear energy [51]. How to respond to these conditions, fewer water resources but higher cooling needs, requires investigating the interwoven interactions among technical systems (power generation, water systems), the existing urban fabric and the rules and codes that guide land development and urban morphology (buildings, roads, access, urban growth, vegetation, cooling centers), and the nested and tiered regulatory purview of electricity generation itself
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