Urban heat is evolving into a prevalent climate disaster with significant global impacts. What is worse, its impacts on human health, ecological environment, and socio-economic systems are expected to intensify in the coming decades. Existing studies have made prominent contributions to the knowledge of urban heat mitigation, adaptation, and management. However, limited techniques and solutions have been included in cities and communities. Against this backdrop, the transformation actions for advancing cool cities and communities, with the involvement of multiple stakeholders, have become crucial for creating healthy, livable, and sustainable climate-resilient human settlements.
Based on a systematic review of theories, technologies, and pilot actions related to "sustainable cool cities and communities," this study aims to construct a multidimensional evaluation system for sustainable cool cities and communities. This system is expected to not only guide practitioners to implement mitigation, adaptation, and management solutions but also effectively coordinate collaborative actions across multiple sectors and fields, including planning and design, meteorology, energy, finance, health, education and so on by enhancing institutional transformation.
The evaluation system presents the pathways to sustainable cool cities and communities through four themes: development of heat risk assessment and early warning systems, planning and design of cooling strategies and adaptation service, design of heat-resilient and low-carbon buildings and technologies, and education and training for perception and behavioral change. Centered around these themes, 22 specific measures are proposed to be precisely implemented based on cities' and communities' unique needs and capacities.
Overall, addressing the challenge of extreme heat requires collective efforts from multiple stakeholders. This study assists local governments in coordinating interdepartmental collaboration, optimizing decision-making processes and allocating resources in a targeted manner, while providing references for planners and managers to contribute to the realization of sustainable cool cities and communities.