Heatwaves may mean Sydney is too hot for people to live in 'within decades' - ABC News"Now, faced with the prospect of 50-degree-plus summers, experts say highly urbanised parts of Australia may become unliveable within decades.
The race is on to re-imagine, redesign and rebuild the Australian suburb.
Car parks may be ripped up and planted with trees and greenery, houses retro-fitted with insulation, roads painted to reflect rather than absorb heat, and supermarkets and even whole suburbs built underground to reduce cooling costs.
One centre of these efforts is Western Sydney, home to more than 2.5 million people.
In this floodplain of closely packed houses, heat pools on islands of black bitumen and collects on sun-baked concrete.
The mercury gets close to 50 degrees Celsius here in summer — and that's just the ambient air temperature. The radiant heat from bitumen carparks can push 80C. The surface temperature of playground equipment has been measured at 100C."
And further:
Since 2019, all 33 Sydney councils have been funding a climate adaptation program that has identified heat as the number-one climate threat to Sydneysiders.
"We are not yet building a city that's really equipping our people to survive and adapt extreme heat," says Beck Dawson, who heads the Resilience Sydney program.
"If the community doesn't have access to things to make themselves cool we effectively have a very large oven occurring across the Western Sydney plains.
"The scale of the emerging threat is different to anything we've faced before."
Interesting article by the ALPBC.
Is it time we put a complete halt to immigration? The breakneck speed at which we have "developed" our major cities with massive immigration without any planning or impact on the quality of life of our existing residents is nothing short of criminal, IMO. And yes, it is so easy to just blame everything on AGW - even the urban "heat island" effect from our concrete jungles created to service even greater population!!
