Urban heat waves and adaptive capacity: how can social infrastructure help reduce vulnerability?

The combination of climate change and urban heat island effects mean that cities are projected to face growing threats from heat waves and extreme heat. In addition to aging populations, cities are typically the meeting point of many different other groups with differing vulnerabilities to extreme heat, including immigrants, the homeless, and people with precarious employment. By applying an adaptive capacity framework, this chapter describes how different types of social infrastructure can address heat wave vulnerability. It further highlights the issue of urban socio-economic inequality as a driver of risk and barrier to resilience adaptive capacity and briefly applies this to a case study of the emerging 2021 Vancouver heat wave. After connecting the Vancouver heat wave back to common themes of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, the chapter concludes by proposing that social infrastructure can help translate adaptive capacity from an abstract research and policy concept into one of action.