Conversations on Climate Change that Affect Us Where We Live
From wildfires to urban heat islands, food deserts to our threatened desert toads, the experts offered new stories and new ideas to navigate the climate crisis.
AMONG THE CONVERSATIONS
Mark Hart: Providing Water for Thirsty Wildlife
How do Arizona’s beloved wild creatures get the water they need in a time of drought? With on-location deliveries from the good people at the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
Mark Hart, public information officer for AGFD, covered the need and the effort at a recent Climate Tucson meeting, stressing that the continued heat and drought will make conditions that much more dire for wildlife.
Fire Expert Donald Falk on the Bighorn Fire
Fire ecologist and University of Arizona professor Donald Falk provided an inside look at the scope and consequences of the Bighorn Fire earlier in the summer of 2020. Falk’s research focuses on fire history, fire ecology, and ecological restoration and resilience in a changing world, and with that knowledge he was able to describe in detail the cause and effect of the largest fire on record in the Catalina Mountains.
“Greening” Tucson’s “Food Deserts”: There Are Solutions
Easy access to healthy food is out of reach to 18 percent of Tucson’s population, or 94,000 of our fellow residents, because of where they live: in low-income neighborhoods without grocery stores located within a mile of their homes, what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls “food deserts.” But there is promising news, as Courtney Crosson, architecture professor at the University of Arizona, explained at the May 5, 2021 meeting of Climate Tucson.
Ladd Keith on the Heat Accelerator: the Urban Heat Island
The impacts of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) are ubiquitous in our hot city and in urban areas across the globe, adding upwards of 22 degrees F to the daytime temperature. Worse, UHI also increases nighttime temperatures, which in Tucson are the saving grace of our triple-digit summer days.
In his presentation, “Planning for Extreme Heat,” Ladd Keith of the University of Arizona’s School of Architecture — whose primary research focus is the intersection between climate change and urban planning — presents the problems and the solutions of the Urban Heat Island. He also cautions that very little has been done to address UHI, particularly where solutions are most needed: in our disadvantaged neighborhoods.
About Climate Tucson
Climate Tucson is a community climate change education group that meets on Zoom. Our speakers are climatologists, researchers and others with expertise in the impacts of global warming on our city and region, the Sonoran Desert.
Please contact Karen Peterson with questions.
