Planning for Extreme Heat in San Diego County

Resumen del informe: On April 14th and 15th, 2022, ULI San Diego - Tijuana led a Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) focused on the topic of Heat Resilience and Adaptation Planning for the County of San Diego. With county planning staff as our client, we convened a panel of experts in the fields of climate resiliency, urban planning, environmental planning, economics, and urban design, to explore how Cities across the San Diego and Tijuana region are addressing the threat of extreme heat. The TAP examined heat adaptation planning at citywide and community scales. Recognizing that land use planning plays a pivotal role, the TAP honed in on environmental threats facing urban areas, such as the Urban Heat Island, building and neighborhood-scale mitigation measures, and examples of collaboration efforts between the private and public sectors. Much of county land is rural and diverse.

Over 50% of the metro population of San Diego live in unincorporated areas, and a majority of the county lies within very high fire hazard severity zones. Given this reality, the TAP also recognized the need to examine the real threat of fire hazards related to extreme heat in rural areas of the county. A particular challenge for this TAP was to articulate how heat adaptation strategies vary across a large county with diverse communities (both rural and urban). By leveraging the resource and knowledge base of the panelists, the TAP quickly identified case studies of heat resilience efforts underway across the country. From this list, we highlight key strategies with potential transferability across the region. The purpose of the case study analysis is to expose County staff to examples of the best research and work in the field and to identify ways in which those examples may translate to our unique setting and set of challenges facing our region. We anticipate that an impactful outcome of this effort will be to identify a specific site/ area in the county that warrants more detailed study.