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Heat islands

An urban area next to a more natural rural area showing how the urban area gets hotter than the surrounding land

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Heat islands are urban areas that can have higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas with more greenery.

Heat islands are caused by several factors, including:

the types of materials we use in cities for buildings, pavement, and roads that can absorb more heat than natural surfaces such as leaves or grass
human additions to the sun's heat, such as air conditioning, vehicles, cooking, or machinery
the shapes of our cities that may restrict airflow to carry heat away
the mass of our buildings that can absorb heat and release it gradually, even through the night

More natural, often rural areas with greenery may reflect more light, release moisture and provide shade.

There are ways to help reduce the effect of heat islands, such as planting more urban trees or using green roofs.

Deciduous trees have the handy feature of providing shade for a house in the summer while letting light through in the winter when the leaves fall.

A study using 2015 data found that "doubling tree cover in European cities could cut the number of heat-related deaths during summer months by nearly 40 per cent." In Columbia's Medellín, creating 30 Green Corridors helped to reduce temperatures by 2°C in the first three years of the program.

Learn more about the heat island effect on the EPA site.

Published 24 Jul 2022

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It turns out that, when considering how enjoyable, or indeed how painful something was, we don’t mentally do an average enjoyment check to decide if it was good or bad. Instead, our minds are swayed by the peak and end levels. So, an experience that may have been dull for most of it, if it had a cracking bit in the middle and ended on a high, will generally be remembered as more enjoyable than something that was decent all the way through but never reached those highs. Here’s a classic study of the pain side of the phenomenon from Dan Kahneman: "Kahneman and his associates showed, in 1993, that participants exposed to 30 seconds of 14-degree ice water (very cold!) rated the experience as more painful than participants exposed to 90 seconds of exposure to 60 seconds of 14-degree ice water plus 30 additional seconds of 15-degree ice water. In other words, participants found the 90 seconds of ice water exposure less painful than those exposed to 60 seconds of nearly equally cold water because the 90 seconds ended with exposure to a “warmer” stimulus. We will rate an experience as less painful then if it ends on a slightly less painful way. The “peak-end” in this case was a one-degree difference in water temperature." From Susan Krauss-Whitbourne PhD, Happiness: it’s all about the ending, Psychology Today.…It turns out that, when considering how enjoyable, or indeed how painful something was, we don’t mentally do an average enjoyment check to decide if it was good or bad. Instead, our minds are swayed by the peak and end levels. So, an experience that may have been dull for most of it, if it had a cracking bit in the middle and ended on a high, will generally be remembered as more enjoyable than something that was decent all the way through but never reached those highs. Here’s a classic study of the pain side of the phenomenon from Dan Kahneman: "Kahneman and his associates showed, in 1993, that participants exposed to 30 seconds of 14-degree ice water (very cold!) rated the experience as more painful than participants exposed to 90 seconds of exposure to 60 seconds of 14-degree ice water plus 30 additional seconds of 15-degree ice water. In other words, participants found the 90 seconds of ice water exposure less painful than those exposed to 60 seconds of nearly equally cold water because the 90 seconds ended with exposure to a “warmer” stimulus. We will rate an experience as less painful then if it ends on a slightly less painful way. The “peak-end” in this case was a one-degree difference in water temperature." From Susan Krauss-Whitbourne PhD, Happiness: it’s all about the ending, Psychology Today.

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