[horn honking] - [Narrator] Ah, the urban jungle.

Except, it generally has a lot more concrete than an actual jungle, and that makes it hotter.

- The science behind it is relatively simple.

On a sort of 10,000-foot level, hard surfaces tend to be hotter.

Dark surfaces tend to be hotter.

Soft surfaces tend to be cooler.

Shade tends to be cooler.

Unfortunately, within built environments, within these urban areas, we have lots of areas where we have lots and lots of impervious, hard, dark surfaces that hold onto heat, and make those areas very, very, very hot.

And we have fewer areas with green space and shade, that tend to be cooler.

And because these two can be really close to each other, you can see huge amounts of variation.

Sometimes 15 to even 19 or 20-degree differences between areas within the same city, on the same day.

- [Narrator] We call these hotspots urban heat islands.

And with global temperatures on the rise, that heat can turn deadly.

- Heat is our number one weather-related killer.

And we often don't think about that.

We see the floods, we see the hurricanes, we see the fires on TV.

It's kind of hard to show heat on TV.

But we know that a lot of people die in days with extreme heat, and also nights that are extremely hot.

We already have hot parts of the city, historically.

And we're adding a few degrees more warming to that, and we know they're just going to get more unbearable.

So, what we're trying to do is find out where those parts of the city are so that we can introduce some heat mitigation measures.

- [Narrator] There's a lot of weather data available.

You can easily access a prediction of what your week is gonna be like, sometimes down to the hour.

- But the data that we have to measure temperature is from our cell phones, from weather stations.

That data is very sparse, and it represents generally large areas.

As we walk through an urban area, we may go under some trees, and it's really shady and cooler.

We may walk across that parking lot surface, it's much hotter.

We experience temperature variably throughout an urban area.

The problem is, is that the existing data from weather stations is not fine enough to actually measure those differences.

- Let's go attach this to your car.

- Yeah, let's do it.

- [Narrator] To better understand the true exposure and experience of heat in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, the Museum of Life and Science partnered with local organizations and communities to take on the ground measurements of heat, in the summer of 2021.

- [Max] So this project is a little bit different from perhaps a traditional scientific study in that so much of the data collection, and then a lot of the analysis afterwards, is going to be done, and publicly owned and available, by the people that live there.

- It's really important to know that anybody can be a scientist.

You don't need a PhD to do science.

So what we're trying to do is empower these community members to study their community.

And hopefully with these data, then they can enact some policies, or plans to help mitigate their heat stress - [Narrator] Routes throughout the cities were developed with community input.

And then volunteers carried sensors along those routes three times during the sampling day, morning, midday, and evening.

Data was collected by a car, by bike, and on foot.

The data collected painted a powerful picture.

- The data did indeed show that there were urban heat islands.

It also found that there are existing heat disparities on that neighborhood by neighborhood, or sometimes block by block level.

July 23rd was around 88, 89 degrees, which is pretty much the typical summer day that you'd expect here in central North Carolina.

On that day, in the evening, we reached a temperature difference of about 11 degrees, which is a pretty remarkable finding.

It means that within our study area, and indeed here in Durham, some neighborhoods, sometimes only miles apart, were 11 degrees warmer than neighborhoods that were close by to them.

A lot of what we have found is that if you live in an urban area you're not just doomed to live in a warmer area.

There are pockets, individual small level areas, that are warmer than other parts of the urban area.

- [Narrator] One of those pockets is the historically significant Hayti neighborhood in Durham, which was heavily altered by urban renewal policies in the late 1960s.

- If you look at any of the photographs, or some of the video on what the Hayti community, the district looked like prior to 147, even this venue, when it was a church, there are trees, there's just a beautiful canopy of greenery.

Folks could walk the sidewalks, and sit out, and just enjoy the environment.

All of that was destroyed.

Data and studies have shown that, in general, in other parts of Durham, there might be 60% canopy.

But in the Hayti communities there are only 17% canopy.

That's deplorable.

You've got a lot of residents who can ill afford to be paying higher cooling costs.

But that's exactly what they're having to do because it's so hot in the evenings.

It's not cooling off indoors because that heat is being held.

And it's just really another indication of how the injustice plagues, plagues communities like Hayti of color.

We continue to be impacted by systemic racism, and policies and practices that are totally, totally unjust.

- [Narrator] The publicly available data gathered in this study can be used to support changes in policy and infrastructure that will increase heat resiliency.

- We can plant trees.

Parks are great.

I know that when I'm walking around downtown Raleigh, I'm always switching sides of the sidewalk if there are more trees on one side versus another.

We can also put things like bus shelters in areas that have shade or built canopies over them.

We can direct people to cooling centers on really hot days.

Maybe you can't afford to turn on the air conditioning in your house, but we can show you a place that will be safe for you and your family to go and cool down.

There are some really tangible things we can do that are almost low hanging fruit.

We're not building a seawall, but we're just trying to get people out of harm's way.

- [Narrator] UNC Chapel Hill's data driven Enviro Policy Lab facilitated a hackathon, where people dug deeper into the data.

- The idea of a data science hackathon is to open up the data, get mentors, people who are climate scientists, or have some knowledge about urban heat, or public health, and get people together to try to come up with creative solutions, data analysis, visualization, to help better understand the problem of urban heat exposure, and what we can do about it.

Globally, 65% of people will live in cities by 2030.

And that number will just continue to increase over time.

It's gonna become an increasingly important issue for citizens and policy makers to be aware of, and to do something about.

- [Max] Equitable planning, to make sure that we are not only dealing with these urban heat islands, but also dealing with it in a responsible way, means making sure that we include residents in the phases of planning, so that whatever happens in these areas is led by their priorities and their preferences.