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Wildlife Service Brings Water to Arizona Wildlife as Drought and Heat Intensify

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 future does not look bright as the state gets hotter and the drought continues.

But thankfully for now, animals, birds, reptiles, insects—all the critters that symbolize the wildness of our region—are the beneficiaries of the program that supplies life-sustaining water to 3,000 catchment sites located across remote desert lowlands and mountaintops. Hauled in tanker trucks and dropped from helicopters, last year crews delivered a record-breaking 3 million gallons of water, a portion of the total paid for by Arizona residents donating to the department’s “Send Water” initiative.

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The Bighorn Fire: Causes and Effects, Now and in the Future

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.

Falk is a professor at the UA School of Natural Resources and the Environment, with joint appointments in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and the Institute of the Environment. In 2015, he was a Research Delegate to the Paris climate summit.

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Urban Heat Island: How Hot Is Too Hot?

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 monthly, sometimes more often, now via Zoom. Our speakers are climatologists, researchers and others with expertise in the impacts of global warming on our city and region, the Sonoran Desert.

The mission of Climate Tucson is to inform our community on the state of our climate — hotter and drier — as a means for inspiring needed action. Resilience can only be gained by knowing what the dangers are.

All meetings are free and presentations are recorded and posted on Climate Tucson.

The City of Tucson Walks the Talk About Global Warming

Read the full article in the Tucson Climate Report, a Substack publication from Climate Tucson.

Four years after making history with its declaration of a climate emergency — one of the first American cities to act on what was then a still-looming and controversial threat — Tucson’s mayor and six-member council in 2021 voted 7-0 to adopt the City’s "Heat Action Roadmap."

The 68-page directive is the first offensive in the City’s battle against the increasing, often brutal heat rising from an ever-warming planet, and it's not hyperbole or a case of the “sky is falling” hysteria that’s driving the council.

Tucson's average daily temperature is 4.5 degrees F higher than it was in 1970, "a greater increase than in most other American cities," according to Climate Central. And like all metropolitan areas, our town is being braised on all sides by the combination of climate change-induced heat and the residual heat baked into pavement, concrete, gravel, backyards covered in rocks and pebbles, blocks and blocks of buildings — the natural and man-made elements that make up the urban heat island.