Excited to share our new Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ for Heat guidebook, by myself, Sara Meerow, Phil Berke, and Joseph DeAngelis, AICP and our students including Lauren Jensen, Shaylynn Trego, Erika Schmidt, and Stephanie Smith. PIRS™ for Heat provides an integrated planning approach that coordinates strategies across community plans and uses the best available heat risk information to prioritize heat mitigation strategies for the most vulnerable communities.
Our guidebook provides a step-by-step walkthrough of how to conduct the PIRS™ for Heat approach, as well as case studies with results from our partner communities of Baltimore, Boston, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, and Seattle. For instance, our PIRS™ for Heat results indicate that Boston’s heat mitigation policies are targeting hotter areas and more socially vulnerable communities for heat mitigation. Interestingly though, these two areas are not necessarily co-located.
Our approach was developed as an extension of the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ developed first by Phil Berke and colleagues and originally applied to flooding hazards. The PIRS™ for Heat guidebook was funded by and is freely available thanks to the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Extreme Heat Initiative and a partnership with American Planning Association.