Extreme heat is among the topics of a hands-on sustainability workshop next week, and two NASA experts will be there to talk about their findings.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: October 30, 2024
Host: Sarasota is being watched from space. A NASA program using the International Space Station and two satellites has put the focus on rising heat in the area, identified some of the most problematic hot spots, and came up with recommendations. All this will be presented at an event next week. Julie Morris and Jono Miller interviewed the organizer of that event on their Our Changing Environment show yesterday, and we bring you some more details.
Johannes Werner: Yes, Sarasota County does employ a “Sustainability Outreach Coordinator”. Her name is Alia Garrett, and she is in charge of organizing the annual Sustainable Communities Workshop. The all-day event coming up next Thursday, Nov. 7 is the 19th edition. From 8:30 to 4 at USF Sarasota Manatee’s Selby Auditorium, four panels organized around the elements – water, fire, earth and air – will present hands-on responses to the biggest challenges we are facing.
It’s all about resilience, adaptation, extreme heat, and energy efficiency.
Alia Garrett: Our county sustainability program was founded in 2002, so it was the first one in Florida and the seventh in the nation. And pretty much this whole time, we’ve been hosting an annual Sustainable Communities workshop. So it’s such a great way to gather our community around sustainability. And you know, this is an opportunity. This year, we know that people are still recovering from the storms, and our heart goes out to them. So this is a chance to connect, rebuild, and really come together and talk about challenges and solutions going forward.
Alia Garrett
JW: Students are particularly welcome.
AG: There’s so much climate anxiety in the younger generations, and this day is really about positivity and hope, solutions, action-oriented, so you’ll leave feeling hopeful and positive. That’s what we try to maintain at all of our workshops, because it can be scary and doom-and-gloom, and we just want to make sure that we’re uplifting everybody there.
JW: One of the highlights is the afternoon panel about heat. On it are two NASA experts involved in a survey the space agency performed for Sarasota County.
AG: Extreme heat has been my jam lately, and over the summer, I worked with NASA for 10 weeks to do an extreme heat study in Sarasota County. So they were using the International Space Station and some satellites, Landsats 8 and 9, to collect land surface temperature, tree canopy coverage, and albedo, evapotranspiration, all of those important things, but then also looking at not just where it’s the hottest, but where the most vulnerable populations are.
So it was just such a cool experience, and it’s amazing the amount of detail in high resolution that they’re able to gather. So it’s just so useful and very direct to our community, to Sarasota County, because we know it’s hot and it’s getting hotter, but by exactly how much and what and where. So it’s good for us to know that information, so we can use that to then do targeted mitigation efforts.
Source: Google Image
The first two panelists are actually, they work with NASA. They’ll be coming in person to tell us more about the study and the hot spots that they identified in our community. We did find, of course, that urban areas were the hottest. So in order, it’s North Sarasota, Venice and then North Port. But we did find, I think it was 26 census tracts with extreme heat issues.
JW: Trees could be a big part of the solution.
AG: Tree canopy vegetation, it helps cool, it keeps shade, and there’s so many other benefits to it as well, especially with flooding. So what I really want to see is more tree plantings, urban canopy, things like that. So trying to do implementation projects — and that was one of the things that NASA actually mentioned, because I won’t spoil it, but they did give us some recommendations for next steps. So us at the county, we always want to do project implementations. I did apply for an EPA grant, and should be hearing back soon. Please, pray, hope and wish for me, but we will be establishing some resilience hubs and cooling centers in North Sarasota if all goes well. So you know, it’s great that we have this study now, but now we need to do something with that.
JW: St Petersburg is a kind of pioneer for trees in this area
AG: I’m very jealous of St. Pete, because they have a great program, the Healthy Neighborhoods, and what they do is tree plantings in urban areas, particularly low income, disadvantaged communities that historically have lacked tree canopy coverage. So it’s been a very successful initiative that they have there with mitigating extreme heat, improving air quality.
JW: WSLR is one of the sponsors of the event, and Julie Morris and Jono Miller will MC. To listen to the entire interview, go to the archive on wslr.org and search for the latest edition of “Our Changing Environment”.
More information about the workshop here: https://www.scgov.net/government/uf-ifas-extension-and-sustainability/sustainability/sustainable-communities-workshop/sustainable-communities-workshop-resources
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