Miami-Dade Issues ‘Extreme Heat Action Plan’

Miami-Dade County has issued a new plan aimed at mitigating the effects of extreme heat in the region through infrastructure improvements and public education. David Volz reports on the story for Route Fifty. The Extreme Heat Action Plan, announced by the county’s mayor along with the Resilient305 partnership and the Miami Foundation, proposes “a combination of blue, green, and gray infrastructure to cool neighborhoods and communities.”

As Volz explains, “Miami-Dade is known for its vulnerability to hurricanes, but extreme heat causes more deaths and has a greater annual economic impact than any other weather-related disaster.” Roughly 34 people in the county die from heat-related causes every year.

One way officials plan to educate the public is to name extreme heat waves in the way hurricanes are named. Also, the county has begun retrofitting virtually all public housing units with efficient air conditioning and is working to expand the tree canopy, which is currently at 20 percent, to 30 percent by 2030.

The plan also suggests that the county develop “pilot programs of different types of cool pavements on walkways, bike paths, parking lots and low-volume roads, while working with the Federal Highway Administration and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) on similar pilots for higher-trafficked roads.”

In 2022, Miami-Dade County became one of the first government entities to hire a ‘heat officer,’ an official tasked with developing strategies for combating the effects of extreme heat.