#BUandBoston: Ian Smith Develops Tool to Assess Heat Impacts from Proposed Development Projects in the City of Boston
This post is part of our #BUandBoston series, highlighting the work and research of BU students, faculty, and staff throughout the City of Boston. Interested in having your Boston-related work featured? Tag us on Instagram or Twitter (@BUonCities) using the #BUandBoston or send us an email at ioc@bu.edu.
Ian Smith, a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environment in the BU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the URBAN Program, was recently awarded $5,000 through the MetroLab Network’s Civic Research Innovation Prize Pitch Competition. The prize awarded innovative ideas for civic research projects to carry out in partnership with a local government agency or community partner.
Smith previously received a 2021 Early Stage Urban Research Award from Initiative on Cities (IOC) for his project, “Where Do Urban Trees Get Their Water?” IOC and URBAN recently produced a video to highlight Smith’s research on urban trees, which can be found here.
Smith is working with the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) to develop a tool to establish climate-sensitive design guidelines for development projects. The tool supports the goals of the City of Boston’s Heat Resilience Study as it allows users to input developer specifications about proposed land cover change to explore how development might impact the temperature dynamics of the land. The MetroLab award will allow Smith to develop a user interface for the decision support software, expand the applicability to other cities, and integrate new features that capture the social dimensions of heat exposure.
During his time as an URBAN trainee, Smith interned with the Boston Transportation Department, where he evaluated the impact of a proposed development project on ecosystem services from the vegetation in that area. At the end of his internship, Smith presented his work to several departments in the city, and the BPDA reached out to determine whether a similar project could be applied to the rest of Boston.
“The BPDA is committed to ensuring that new development is resilient and prepared for the impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, extreme precipitation, and heat island effect,” said Travis Anderson, Senior Infrastructure and Energy Planner at BPDA. “BPDA staff have had initial conversations with Ian Smith and Dr. Lucy Hutyra regarding additional measures to incorporate heat resiliency measures into the development review process, and recognize the importance of establishing a tool to better analyze the impact of surface temperatures in both new and existing projects. The BPDA looks forward to continuing to collaborate on these important efforts.”
Smith is using remote sensing observations of temperature and land cover in his model. His goal is to create a framework for considering new development or redevelopment in Boston, in which the proposed project’s specifications can be used to estimate the change in temperature of the land parcel. Smith explained that he is excited by this opportunity to do novel research that advances knowledge in the scientific community but can also be applied to the real world.
“Cities are getting hotter. There’s one angle of tackling that through climate change mitigation, which includes increasing energy efficiency, reducing carbon emissions, and other large-scale processes. But at the end of the day, there’s also going to have to be some component of climate adaptation,” said Smith. “There are two really powerful ways that cities can engineer the landscape to achieve improvements in heat resiliency: green space and white roofs.”
Smith explained that green space reduces temperatures by shading land surfaces and preventing solar radiation from reaching the ground. Trees also have evaporative cooling processes, which can transpire water and cool the air around them. Changing the color of a roof can also increase the reflectivity of a surface, which is often accomplished through white roofs.
“What’s interesting about this tool is you can play around with it. For example, if there are no white roofs associated with a new development, what if we paint the roofs way to increase the reflectivity of the land parcel? What if we plant 10 more trees to increase the canopy cover by X percent? With some sort of heat resiliency target in mind, what would it take to meet that? In the review process, we can see how we might change the plan to make it better,” said Smith.
Smith said he is looking forward to applying the work he’s doing as part of his dissertation to have an impact outside of the academic community. While he is developing this tool for the BPDA, he is also researching six other cities across the country to determine how applicable the model may be in other places.
“If we are able to apply this and have it become part of Boston’s process for improving heat resiliency, and if it’s effective here, then can it also be effective in cities from the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, and the Southwest, given the sensitivities of temperature to these different land covers change?” said Smith. “I’m excited about the ability to apply data-driven rigorous science to deal with real world issues in a way that is simple and easily explained to the public and government officials. I think this is a very unique opportunity to merge science and policy.”
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