Climate change and rapid urban development are making cities hotter. With heatwaves rising in frequency and severity, adapting South African cities for a hotter future is crucial. On a hot summer’s day, air temperatures can vary by 10°C between neighbourhoods. By 2050, projections suggest that the number of hot days per year could increase six-fold. Innovative data collection methods, like the ‘Cool Cities Living Lab Community Heat Mapping Campaigns, ‘ provide essential insights for city leaders to tackle current and future impacts of extreme heat while building citizen support for action. These campaigns demonstrate an established methodology to measure temperature variations across a city, generating actionable information to inform the design of effective heat mitigation strategies such as tree planting, shading initiatives, cool building designs, and early warning systems.
Cities can utilize these evidence-based outputs to prioritize heat mitigation actions that address the needs of the most vulnerable populations. The Cool Cities Living Lab: Heat Mapping Technical Seminars were convened by the World Bank’sCity Resilience Program in partnership with the cities of Buffalo City, Cape Town and Tshwane and the National Treasury Cities Support Programme, with support from theSwiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. Building on the outcomes of the Heat Mapping Campaigns conducted in the summer of 2024, these events brought together managerial and technical-level staff from various departments and agencies to highlight the extent of heat exposure in the three cities, the implications of this exposure for city strategies, and, to discuss key priorities for effective heat adaptation and mitigation.