A look at how Urban Adapt's heat risk assessments have shaped policy and planning decisions — from interactive public tools to citywide mitigation strategy.
Urban Adapt partnered with Hennepin County in Minnesota to carry out a county-wide heat risk assessment. This public-facing ArcGIS StoryMap shows where extreme heat and vulnerable residents overlap and how greening could bring temperatures down.
Combining exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity into a county-wide heat vulnerability index, the assessment pinpoints where vulnerable residents face the hottest conditions, with the highest vulnerability concentrated in eastern Hennepin County. Scenario modeling shows how tree planting, de-paving, and canopy loss would change temperatures across the county.
Selected assessments and the outcomes they informed.
Our approach uses high-resolution climate modeling — down to roughly one city block — to simulate air temperature across a city's microclimates, then pairs it with epidemiological modeling to estimate real health impacts under different mitigation scenarios.
Each assessment models heat exposure under current land use, then simulates a series of mitigation scenarios — varying tree canopy and cool roofing by neighborhood — to guide policy decisions.
