The Smart Surfaces Story
September 17, 2020
Our planet is warming. The past 10 years have been some of the hottest ever recorded—and they’re just getting hotter. In cities especially, dark, impervious surfaces bottle up heat and raise temperatures. Black pavement scorches feet through the soles of our shoes. Cars become ovens after just an hour left in the sun. Instead of playing outdoors, families huddle inside and crank up the air conditioning— and some still can’t find relief. Apocalyptic headlines warn of heat waves, wildfires, extreme weather events. And with each passing year, many of the world’s cities, projected to be home to over two-thirds of the world’s population by 2050, are becoming increasingly unlivable during long and longer summers.
Current campaigns to make cities more livable have not been successful. Dark, impervious surfaces comprise two-thirds of city areas, and in the summers, can heat cities by an average of 9 degrees Fahrenheit more than surrounding countryside. In low-income areas, the effects are even worse—low income and all too often minority neighborhoods can be a scorching 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, imposing huge health and economic burdens on those who can least afford it. These dark, hot, impervious surfaces contribute to smog and other pollution, increase flooding events, and create greater health risks and excess heat deaths. As a result of our current practices, cities continue to warm, social inequalities continue to widen, and health continues to deteriorate. Urban tree coverage has dropped in the last decade. And accelerating climate warming poses a threat to our health, our wallets, and so much more. We’re moving in the wrong direction.
Cool, porous, and reflective surfaces offer a solution—but so far, they have only been implemented in less than 0.1 percent of cities. Today, most such initiatives are small, piecemeal pilots that fail to address the interconnectedness of our climate and livability problem. City departments responsible for transportation or energy, for example, choose the low-cost, “safe” options used in the past. They have neither the authority nor the expertise to include in decision-making the large health, employment, air or water quality, or other costs that result directly from their surfacing decisions. Moreover, city administrators have long lacked the tools to accurately appraise the varied and long-term benefits of implementing lighter-colored, porous or greener solutions, trees and solar PV. This is a set of solutions we now call “smart surfaces.”
Enter the Smart Surfaces Coalition. The Smart Surfaces Coalition was founded in 2019 by businessman and environmental entrepreneur Gregory Kats, working with like-minded leaders, including Vivian Loftness and Frank Loy, across varied areas of expertise. The Coalition works with partners and thought leaders in city planning, health, architecture, low-income housing, green design, finance, and a range of other fields. These partners share the emerging conviction that we must respond to this urgent need for a more effective and integrated approach to improving city livability. The Smart Surfaces Coalition is comprised of 40+ leading organizations across multiple sectors, such as the American Public Health Association, American Institute of Architects, National League of Cities, the American Planning Association, the US Green Building Council, the International Downtown Association, and Habitat for Humanity. The term “smart surfaces” is a new framework that brings together a variety of solutions to more intelligently use and manage sun and rain. Smart surfaces include porous pavements, solar PV, reflective surfaces, green roofs, tree cover, and integrated solutions that both cut costs and increase the surfaces’ benefits, such as solar panels on a green roof. This conceptual umbrella avoids an inefficient and fragmented approach by bundling these strategies together as a single solution. This solution enables cities and towns to use all local surfaces to manage sun and rain intelligently, creating benefits and livability, rather than excess heat, pollution, and flooding. The smart surfaces strategy also helps cites move from piecemeal pilots to the adoption of smart surfaces as a standard design norm.
Implementing smart surfaces offers cities a solution with enormous benefits. City-wide implementation of smart surfaces across the United States would cut urban contribution to climate change by 10-15%, while global urban adoption could reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by about 10%. Smart surfaces are one of the few climate solutions that simultaneously acts as a mitigation and adaptation strategy. Urban adoption of smart surfaces can cool cities by 1℃ per decade through 2050, meaning cities can become measurably cooler despite global warming.
Moreover, smart surfaces are economically feasible, and in most cases very cost-effective, delivering a large positive financial return. As part of the strategy of the Smart Surfaces Coalition and with help from 28 cities and numerous partners, we have built a cost-benefit analytic engine that enables city-specific analysis of a broad range of costs and benefits associated with implementing smart surfaces on a city-wide scale. After accounting for hundreds of factors, the average benefit-cost ratio for most cities falls between 2:1 and 4:1. Across the United States, building the necessary infrastructure and adopting smart surfaces would save $700 billion, lower energy costs and city temperature, and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs—all achievable in the next three decades. Smart surfaces adoption would boost employment and strengthen our economy at a time our country gravely needs it. Smart Surfaces are not only essential to keep our cities livable—they are also cost-effective and economically advantageous in the long run. The Smart Surfaces Coalition’s purpose is to enable and motivate cities to switch to smart surfaces by building and providing analytic tools, support, and education to all cities and towns.
Four central issues of 2020—massive unemployment, public health, the push to address systemic racial inequity, and the reality of accelerating climate change—can all be addressed by urban implementation of Smart Surfaces. We’ve been trying to improve our outdated, baseline infrastructure gradually and one approach at a time. It’s not enough—we are losing ground. The gradual approach is not working. We need to improve health and livability, lessen inequity, and slow climate change—all in a cost-effective way that reduces energy costs imposed on every stakeholder and creates jobs. It’s time to flip the binary switch from hot, costly, and harmful surfaces, to cool, green, and cost-effective Smart Surfaces.