As heat-stricken municipalities everywhere turn to cooling centres to protect vulnerable citizens, some public health and climate adaptation experts are beginning to confront the challenge of making the facilities known and accessible to the people who need them most.
Even so, they warn cooling centres cannot be the be-all and end-all of the local response to increasingly lethal summer temperatures.
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In a publication directed at community organizations that may be running a cooling centre, or thinking of opening one, Vancouver Public Health focuses on how to make cooling centres welcoming places for vulnerable people on the street.
“For example, people who are marginally housed may not feel welcomed or accommodated when they cannot bring their possessions into a cooling space,” the guidance document states. “Making cooling spaces accommodating, equitable, and culturally safe maximizes their ability to protect health during hot weather.”
With nighttime low temperatures now more likely to remain stubbornly high—thus depriving heat-stressed bodies of the reprieve they urgently need—Vancouver Coastal Health also recommends “consistent and protective hours of operation.” That means “staying open during the afternoon and evening when temperatures in buildings are at their highest, and considering overnight hours during extreme heat emergencies.”
The document also urges community organizations to do everything possible to share news of their cooling centres across their neighborhoods, using posters, sandwich boards, and community message boards as well as social media as conduits.
A related, top-of-mind concern for those evaluating the widespread embrace of the idea of a “cooling centre” is that even as the mercury soars, some of those in most urgent need of such places may find them very hard to access.
“A cooling centre is an excellent resource, but a poor 85-year-old with severely arthritic knees or a broken hip is unlikely to be able to descend a seven-story spiral staircase in order to access it,” wrote Richard Keller, medical ethicist at University of Wisconsin Madison, in a 2015 study of the lethal Paris heat wave of 2003.
That concern is front and centre in a recent Washington Post article that identifies inaccessibility, a lack of awareness, and social stigma as factors likely to “trip up efforts to get the most vulnerable into a cool place.”
All of these factors make cooling centres a “temporary fix,” and “fine as long as you can get there,” Larry Kalkstein, chief heat science adviser at the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, told the Post.
An inability to make it up or down the stairs isn’t the only thing that can keep a cooling centre out of reach. In many cases, they are quite literally too far away to make a difference.
Citing a 2021 study of 25 U.S. cooling centres, the Post reports that “only 10.3% of people were within walking distance—about half a mile—of a cooling centre, on average.”
In reliably scorching cities like San José, California and Phoenix, Arizona, fewer than 5% of residents live within that critical half-mile of relief.
And inaccessibility is not the only obstacle. “Elderly people are often uncomfortable relocating to an unfamiliar setting, even one with good air conditioning,” notes the Post, and they’re also amongst the “least wired” for online communication. They may therefore be oblivious to the digital smoke signals that might typically be used to advertise the need and availability of cooling centres.
Social stigma may also keep some heat-vulnerable people from taking advantage of the service.
“We need to be creative in thinking about how we make them accessible and not perceived as [a space] for certain groups of people,” namely, the poor and the old, Elena Grossman, senior research specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health, told the Post.
At least in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the assumption that cooling centres are used mostly by poor people would be correct. One study found that 84% of users were unemployed, and more than a quarter said electricity costs kept them from installing an air conditioner, writes the Post.
But even at their best, most accessible, most well-advertised, and most welcoming, cooling centres cannot be expected to carry the weight of a city’s response to heat, say experts like Grossman. In the absence of more systemic adaptive measures like expanding green spaces and tree canopies, painting roofs white, and changing building codes to require passive cooling, cities and buildings will just get hotter and hotter.
And in the absence of energy conservation and a resilient grid, the air conditioning upon which most cooling centres depend is itself profoundly vulnerable.
In the absence of more systematic measures to cool cities down, cooling centres remain “a stop gap Band-Aid,” the Canadian Climate Institute’s Ryan Ness told to CBC News last week.
