Meet Melbourne’s chief heat officers

Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Lovely to meet you. So I would like to start by unpacking this relatively new position, Chief Heat Officer because it didn't exist 34 years ago. So Tiffany let me start with you. Could you just give us a sense of what AC O actually does? Yeah. Sure. So Chief Heat Officers are principally engaged with the community to really elevate heat as a critical health issue. How that does impact our bodies on our health on the way that we go about

our lives that is being exacerbated by climate change. Melbourne is the only city with two CHS Tiffany. Can you share your journey to becoming Melbourne's C? My background is in law and I was legal counsel for 10 years

here at the city of Melbourne. And my education was very much in environmental policy and Chris and I started working together when she was leading some of the city of Melbourne's early work on sustainability, working on the Melbourne Renewable Energy Project on the 1200 buildings program on environmental upgrade finance. And I guess you could say we started scheming together way back then. So when this role became available as director, you know, has all good things start

over coffee. Thought two heads are better than one and with our complementary skills, we were successful in taking that role. And since then, we have 11 extremely supportive councilors who have declared a climate and biodiversity emergency. Recognizing that we are facing an unprecedented challenge but also an opportunity around climate change to build a city that is healthy, that is resilient and that people

are thriving. I see, OK, I mean, we see dangerous hot weather becoming more common, more extreme on every continent. But I wonder how Melbourne has been affected? What is the scale of the problem you're facing? Christine and cities by their nature can be much hotter than regional environments. Because of all the concrete, the way we've built, cities really absorbs the heat. And the urban heat island effect in Melbourne can be up to 4 to 8

degrees hotter than our surrounding regional areas. At the moment, we experience about 11 or 12 days per year of extreme heat. And those days are when it's over 35 degrees during the day, but also over 20 degrees Celsius at night. That's when people experience a heat stress, particularly when the night time temperature doesn't drop. So there's not a chance to recover and

seek reprieve from that stress during the day. We know with the climate heating up, that average is likely to go up to somewhere between 16 and 20 days out of extreme heat. And again, that being an average. So some years there might be 30. So that's a whole month in a year of extreme heat. So it's also quite a dry heat that

makes it even more challenging to deal with. From a health perspective, we know our most vulnerable people that can be Children, the elderly people with health conditions and people who are socially disadvantaged, their housing situations doesn't give them a place to escape and that's really where we're focused is ensuring that we are protecting our most vulnerable and

providing places of refuge Christo. You earlier mentioned the equity issue because it's no secret that heat disproportionately affects marginalized communities and those with limited resources. How is Melbourne supporting those who may struggle to afford cooling solutions? Yes, it's a really important issue. And the first step that we've taken is really to seek to understand the challenges that those community members face. So throughout this summer, we had some direct engagement where we went

out to our communities. We provided heat, help get some seminars to help them understand how to prepare what they should be looking for in terms of when heat waves are come, but also to listen and understand what do they do in a heat wave. And we heard some really challenging stories about people sleeping under trees or in stairwells of housing complexes because they simply couldn't

get refuge in their own units. We know that there are community groups that operate around these vulnerable communities is that open up air conditioned rooms overnight. So part of our work is making sure that everyone has access to somewhere cool during the day at home and night, making sure that people know each other in the community because part of building community resilience is connection between community

members so that we can check on each other. And then one of the things is really just understanding where in Melbourne are the hot spots and how do they relate to where our vulnerable community are living and then looking at what can we do to make those areas cooler through whether it's raining or other sorts of shading. We're exploring, you touched on human health, but Tiffany here it is also impacting food and water security as well. I wonder how you are managing resources

also mitigating the impacts of water scarcity. It's going to be more of an issue now that La Nina is definitely over. So we're looking at a much hotter and drier summer or series of summers than we have been experiencing over the past three years. What that will bring is increased water scarcity. So we're not the only players in this space. We have water authorities, state governments, federal governments who are also well attuned and planning for a water scarce future.

Part of our function here at the city is water sensitive urban design, ensuring that we are capturing as much rainwater in storm events as possible and storing those for the times when we need those. Because if we are going to have a successful urban forest that is able to cool our city by up to

four degrees, we need water to sustain that forest. We need water to sustain our beautiful parks and gardens and all of the green infrastructure that we're starting to plan and see come to fruition across the city in places such as green walls and green roo. One of the things that Chris De also touched on is that with our really dry climate, it's bringing water to people's attention as an opportunity

to cool. So that doesn't just mean going and jumping into the swimming pool because not everybody's going to have access to places like that. But how can we integrate water into our landscape through say water fountains, water play misters around the city places that without even realizing that people can experience so that they really do consider the city as a place of cool respite. Hello, my name is Steve Lai and I'm Theresa Tang.

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Tiffany, I wonder how you are engaging businesses to adopt sustainable practices. Could you give us some examples that actually worked? Yeah, it's a great question because we are in the early stages of our heat work and we don't hold all the levers and need to be working collaboratively with our stakeholders across the municipality to achieve our climate objectives. An example of that is the development of our zero carbon

buildings plan. So 60% of our emissions in the city are actually generated by commercial buildings and we need to bring down that emissions profile rapidly. So we've led a series of workshops with the private sector and particularly those in the property sector. We've actively engaged with the property council here in Australia around the development of a whole suite of tools that might be effective and then really going back to understand, well, what are

our levers of control that we could use? How can we advocate to the state and federal governments here in Australia to make some changes? What funding and finance might be needed? Can we look at facilitating leases to incentivize the commercial building sector to more rapidly upgrade their buildings and make their buildings better places as well for their tenants. We also work really strongly with the Bureau of Meteorology and

the research institutions to really understand data. So unfortunately, there can be a lag between when that heat event has happened and where we have knowledge of it. So that's one of the reasons why heat is known as a silent killer. Is it unlike a bushfire or a flood where there's a very strong visual hazard that heat is silent and where it just unfortunately led to a number of deaths.

So we need to collaborate with those. So relationships are critical, all hands on deck and speaking of collaboration and knowledge sharing. I understand there is a sizable group of cos out there around the world. I wonder how often do you speak to each other? Engage, share lessons, practices. Yes, we have a wonderful coordination through Ash Rock who are really focused on creating this network through the

Urban Heat resilience alliance. And brought the idea of establishing the Chief Heat Officer role at seven cities or eight cities now. So we connect probably about monthly formally, but there's certainly a lot of informal connection as well. Learning from a wonderful group of women from Freetown in Sierra Leone, DACA, Miami L A and Monterey and Santiago. So such a diversity in cities. But the reality is that the challenges and the focus and the actions, there's a lot of alignment in terms

of what we're doing and learning from each other. I also found it very interesting. You mentioned it briefly that all of the Chief Heat Officers and the world are women. Do you think this is a coincidence or what are your thoughts on this? A not a coincidence. It was quite deliberate on the part of the Aro Foundation and that is for a reason. And that is that heat disproportionately impacts women around

the world, particularly in the global South. But it is an issue that impacts disproportionately women and that's borne out by data that's very interesting and recently hearing worrying reports where they talk about scenarios in which the world is almost certain to miss that 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. And let's face it. There have been numerous agreements, recommendations and proposals, but the reality is the planet is still warming.

So I wonder in light of this reality, how would you respond to those who say that it's now too late to versus trends to mitigate the impact of global warming? Who would you like to go first? Yes, I have days like that as well. And Tiffany and I are lucky to be working on both sides of the equation in terms of working on innovative strategies to transition Melbourne to be 100%

renewable energy and zero net emissions by 2040. And it is very easy to only see the negative stories, but also you see progress every day in terms of making that transition and that comes from all sectors. You know, governments continually funding and taking action towards mitigating and getting to 100% renewable energy. The markets are driving at renewable energy in Australia is now a lot cheaper than establishing new forms

of fossil fuels. So while it feels like there's slow progress, when you look at where we were 10 years ago, progress is ramping up every day. But on the same time, we are crossing those thresholds. So we also need to work on the adaptation and accept that our reality and our future is likely to be hotter in Melbourne, we will experience less rainfall but more extreme rainfall events. So we're also working on how do we prepare the community from flooding, et cetera. So

I guess I get hope from that. The pace of change continues to grow and continue to focus on those positive stories every day rather than being dragged down because otherwise it's hard to keep going. You focus on the fact that the climate is changing and Tiffany, what gives you hope? Oh, I have so much hope and you wouldn't be human or it would

be unusual working in this space. If you didn't have some days of some despair, I have hope because we are surrounded by some pretty incredible, inspiring young people who are so talented. They keep us on our toes. The knowledge, the energy that the younger generations are bringing to this problem is astounding

and sometimes our biggest challenges become our biggest opportunities. And what we have now is an opportunity to transform our cities into really brilliant, beautiful, healthy places where we're integrating green infrastructure into the way that we build our buildings and our roads and our public spaces where we can transform people's homes the way that they live, whether they're not spending hours and hours commuting, they might instead be adopting a 20 minute

neighborhood. So I think that we've got this moment in time that feels painful, but that could be quite transformative and it's really important to have hope and to talk to people and find those opportunities and those glimmers. Isn't it a great message to end on Tiffany Krista? Thank you both for enlightening and engaging conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your insight and also experiences as a chief hit officers in Melbourne. Stay cool and stay resilient.

Thanks so much, Julie. A pleasure. Thank you. Well, thanks to my guest and thanks to all of you for tuning in. We hope you enjoy this episode but do remember to subscribe and like this podcast. So, you know, when a new episode drops, you can find the C N A S climate and sustainability coverage online at C N A dot asia. The team behind this podcast is Joan Chan Charlene. So Jacqueline Chan and Christina Robert and I'm Julie Yu signing off.