Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated todayheadline

Straddling the border with Mexico along the Rio Grande, the city of Laredo, Texas and its 260,000 residents don’t just have to deal with the region’s ferocious heat. Laredo’s roads, sidewalks, and buildings absorb the sun’s energy and slowly release it at night, a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. That can make a hot spell far more dangerous than for people living in the surrounding countryside, where temperatures might stay many degrees cooler. The effect partly explains why extreme heat kills twice as many people each year in the United States than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

To better understand how this heat island effect plays out in Laredo, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last summer and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, taught himself to organize all that data and used it to create the map below. (Red shows where it’s hottest in the afternoon and blue where it’s coolest — notice the disparities between neighborhoods.) 

But Villaseñor wanted a more professional map to make it easier to navigate. He also wanted to hire someone to take thermal pictures on the ground in the hottest neighborhoods so that the center could create an interactive website for Laredo’s residents. He reckoned the city council could use such a site to figure out where to install more shading for people waiting at bus stops, for instance. So he applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The research center was ready to announce on May 5 that the Rio Grande nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected to work closely with its researchers to tailor plans for addressing urban heat, according to V. Kelly Turner, who co-led the Center for Heat Resilient Communities. But the day before the announcement, Turner received a notice from NOAA that it was defunding the center. Turner says it sent another termination of funding notice to a separate data-gathering group, the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring, which was created with the same IRA funding. (When contacted for this story, a NOAA representative directed Grist to Turner for comment.) “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

It’s the latest in a flurry of cuts across the federal government since President Donald Trump took office in January. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has canceled hundreds of grants meant to help communities curb pollution and make themselves more resilient, such as by updating wastewater systems. NOAA announced last month that it would axe a database that tracks billion-dollar disasters, which experts said will hobble communities’ ability to assess the risk of catastrophes. Major job cuts at NOAA also have hurricane scientists worried that coastal cities — especially along the Gulf Coast — won’t get accurate forecasts of storms headed their way.

The defunding of the Center for Heat Resilient Communities came as a surprise to the group’s own leaders, who said they will continue collaborating with cities on their own. Though its budget was just $2.25 million, they say that money could have gone a long way in helping not just the grantees, but communities anywhere in the U.S. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm and momentum for doing this kind of work, and we’re not going to just let that go,” said Turner, who’s also associate director of heat research at the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re going to continue to interface with [communities], it’s just going to be incredibly scaled down.”

The program would have been the first of its kind in the U.S. In an ideal scenario, the Center for Heat Resilient Communities could have developed a universal heat plan for every city in the country. The challenge, however, is not only that heat varies significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood — richer areas with more green spaces tend to be much cooler — but also that no two cities experience heat the same way. A sticky, humid 90 degrees in Miami, for example, will feel a whole lot worse than 90 in Phoenix. 

Turner and her colleagues at the research center had planned to work with a range of communities — coastal, rural, agricultural, tribal — for a year to craft action plans and discuss ways to construct green spaces, open more cooling centers for people to seek shelter, or outfit homes with better insulation and windows. “If the community was in a heavily vegetated, forested area, maybe urban forestry wouldn’t be the strategy that they’re interested in learning more about,” said Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, who co-led the center. “It might be something more about housing quality.”

The researchers had also planned to help communities determine who’s most at risk from rising heat, based on local economies and demographics. Rural economies, for example, have more agricultural workers exposed in shade-free fields, whereas office workers in urban areas find relief from air conditioning. Some cities have higher populations of elderly people, who need extra protection because their bodies don’t handle heat as well as those of younger folks. 

While each city has a unique approach to handling heat, the 15 communities chosen represented the many geographies and climates of the U.S., Keith said. With this collaboration, the researchers would have been able to piece together a publicly available guide that any other city could consult. “We would have also learned quite a lot from their participation,” Keith said. “We would have had a really robust roadmap that would be really applicable to all cities across the country.”

The funding from NOAA might be gone, but what remains is the expertise that these researchers can still provide to communities as independent scientists. “We don’t want to leave them completely hanging,” Turner said. “While we can’t do as in-depth and rigorous work with them, we still feel like we owe it to them to help with their heat resilience plans.”

Villaseñor, for his part, said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. He might rely on volunteers, for instance, to take those thermal images of the Lardeo’s hot spots. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding,” Villaseñor said.