Atlanta is often called the “city in a forest” because of its dense urban tree canopy that spans nearly half the city. With trees come shade and cooling; however, in underserved communities in the Atlanta metro area, that nickname is beginning to lose its power as they experience disproportionate heat islands. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. Urban heat islands occur when a city experiences much warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas.
Photo by Laura Nwogu/The Atlanta Voice
The annual Parks and Greenspace Conference, which took place on Monday at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, addressed these concerns with a workshop featuring UrbanHeatATL. UrbanHeatATL is a cross-disciplinary project that began in 2021 and is aimed at mapping Atlanta’s heat islands through community science. It began as a partnership between Spelman College, the Georgia Institute of Technology, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, and the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience. With the help of students and local community members, UrbanHeatATL is walking and cycling through Atlanta neighborhoods and collecting temperatures in underserved areas to further environmental and climate justice in Atlanta.
Since 2021, they’ve collected over 1.9 million temperature records, totaling to about 588 hours worth of data. The project has attracted 200 contributors and received about 1,500 submissions. With their research, they’ve found that maximum urban heating often occurs in locations that reflect the compounded impacts of historic racism. In Atlanta, it’s often reflected in areas with a lack of green spaces and lots of industrial development nearby, with unshaded asphalt areas amplifying that heat and echoing it back into the neighborhoods. Exposure to extreme heat has been associated with a number of chronic disease conditions, such as asthma, with youth asthma prevalence on the rise. This heat greatly impacts older adults and those living in energy-inefficient houses, leading to higher energy costs due to aging buildings and a lack of infrastructure.
One of the neighborhoods this can be seen in is Vine City, a historically Black neighborhood in Atlanta’s Westside, which has been identified as one of the city’s areas with a low amount of tree canopy.
“It’s also being impacted by things like the West Side Superfund site, which means, because of soil remediation, lead contamination in Vine City and English Avenue is causing some additional trees to be taken down as a part of the remediation activities.
“Heat extremes is something that we’re really seeing every summer,” said Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, an environmental justice and public health activist and scholar. “Even if we think about what we’ve been experiencing here recently, we’ve had 80-degree days in March. The data tells us — and climate scientists have been researching this for a while — in terms of the city of Atlanta, that extreme heat is one of the climate hazards that we should be concerned about and that we should be doing something about.”
A goal for UrbanHeatATL is to prove that some neighborhoods are hotter than others. According to the organization, research shows that more than 70% of U.S. counties, low-income, non-white neighborhoods, experience more extreme surface heat than their wealthier, whiter counterparts.
“We see a lot of severity in terms of urban heat, or heat extremes, in densely-populated urban areas. As we think about the city of Atlanta, and how our tree canopy is starting to decrease quite a bit despite some of our efforts to try to restore it. Heat is one of the hazards that we can expect to be dealing with between now and 2050 and perhaps beyond.”
UrbanHeatATL encourages residents to build coalitions within these communities and engage with management companies. They hope that government officials will respond to their data and provide more well-maintained parks, green space and trees in communities of color.