Meet the City of Goleta’s New Sustainability Manager

As chief heat officer of Athens, Greece, Eleni Myrivili is sounding the alarm on extreme heat and looking to help cities build heat resilience.
Video

https://www.ted.com/talks/eleni_myrivili_a_3_part_plan_to_take_on_extreme_heat_waves

Eleni Myrivili wants cities to prepare for extreme heat by developing and adopting climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. For her, this work starts in her home city of Athens, where she was appointed Europe’s first chief heat officer in 2021. She's been using the position to raise awareness of the dangers of extreme heat and co-create and co-design a greener, cooler future for all.

In June 2022, through her role as a senior advisor at Arsht Rock Resilience Center -- and following a memorandum of understanding that Arsht Rock signed with the UN Habitat -- Myrivili was named the first-ever global chief heat officer. Her focus is to work on promoting a heat resilience agenda at UN Habitat, the United Nations' program for human settlements and sustainable urban development.

Myrivili has advocated for an environmental, nature-positive and climate-neutral agenda for more than two decades. A tenured assistant professor at the University of the Aegean, she was elected and has served as Deputy Mayor for the City of Athens, where she designed the "Athens Resilience Strategy for 2030" with the collaboration of hundreds.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/eleni_myrivili

Heat related deaths are under reported ...Extreme heat and heat waves are killing more people than any other extreme... causing deaths, fatigue, mental health issues, work related injuries, lowers the ability of children to learn, kills crops and reduces yields, reduces pollination. More and more farmers are working before day break and harvesting in the night because it is too darn hot.

The use of air conditioners compound the heat effect as they drive heat up.
We need a different way for cooling indoor spaces and outdoor spaces. Using Nature helps solve the problem, creating green corridors, use of water, paths for walking, cycling , electric transportation.

Currently, cities hard services, concrete, cement , steel and glass absorb heat all day and radiate that heat at night. Also heat produced with the cars , air conditioning and the use of energy make cities heat traps , high temperatures at night when the body is to relaxes causes serious Heath issues for people. Accept global warming is happening and come up with new ways of living. Different world, needs allot of adapting and change in our behavior, in the way we build, farm,move around take seriously

Our infrastructure which has been carefully engineered for the past 2 decades the dams, waterways, highways, railways, were carefully engineered for a Climate that no longer exists.

What Can we Do?
Three general Categories
Awareness- recognize the threat, hard sometimes for people to take heat exposure seriously…therefore naming and categorizing heat waves like we do for hurricanes creates metrics for people to understand heat waves
Preparedness- kind of readiness to face the event… helps to protect the most vulnerable..in Athens a phone app provides real time risk assessment…provides a cool space locations on a map… In NY they use a buddy system to check on people during heat waves
Redisign- real task at hand, redesigning our cities to make them cooler and thinking beyond air conditioning and away from fossil fuels, we need an urban design revolution led by Landscape Architects that know about thermal dynamics and the importance of soils that support diversity, which can bring a real revolution in design..our cities will be different metabolic systems…we really really need to urgently build resilience for our current climate conditions and urban scale. The first thing we need to do to reduce heat by bringing in Nature into the Urban Factor. This means a Radical increase of trees, tree coverage, biodiversity, water in the surfaces of our cites so we can bring down the heat. Build back up systems and redundancy systems , flexibility and diversity, think about sustainability and equity... this is how we build resilience …cities learning from cites and it has already started but much much more needs to be done.

Examples
Athen, Roman Aquaduct runs for 20 kms underground producing an enormous amount of water from the hills of Athens to the city of Athens. The water is great for irrigation and will be used for Nature in Urban areas

Medellina,Columbia creating 36 green corridors a dense network of trees and flower beds that have lowered the temperature by 4 degrees Celsius in the city and does allot of systemic systems like captures pollution, noise pollution, water and prevent soil erosion

https://lifeandsoulmagazine.com/2019/12/01/medellins-green-corridors-provide-climate-solution-and-increase-biodiversity-in-columbian-city/#:~:text=Colombia%E2%80%99s%20second%20largest%20city%2C%20Medell%C3%ADn%
2C%20is%20adapting%20to,biodiversity%20and%20reducing%20heat%20stress%20in%20the%
20city.

Seul ,Korea dismantled a massive highway and restored a stream and created 10. 9 km long a blue corridor a continuous space for wildlife and people to walk and bicycles not only lowers temperatures. They found that it lowered temperatures by 5.9 degrees Celsius, protects the city from flooding, attracts visitors everyday created allot of jobs and supported business development then in any other part is Seul.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon#/media/File:%EC%84%9C%EC%9A%B8%EC%9D%98_%EC%95%BC%EA%B2%BD_2.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon#Restoration

Paris is giving free water for cooling

Melbourne Australia, bring Nature and the City strategy where they think of the Whole ecosystem from the soil and the fungi to plants and animals, birds, insects,
NATURE IN THE CITY
THRIVING BIODIVERSITY
AND HEALTHY ECOSYSTEMS
https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/SiteCollectionDocuments/nature-in-the-city-strategy.pdf