Ladd Keith, Ph.D.

Research

I’m a climate planner at the University of Arizona, where I help governments protect people from extreme heat. Because we live in an overheating world, my research focuses on the planning and governance tools required to keep our communities livable. By bridging climate science, urban planning, and public policy, my team translates complex environmental challenges into frameworks that city, county, state, and national governments can put to work.

For practitioners

Free tools and guidance from my research for planners, policymakers, and heat officials.

Planning for Heat Resilience

Historically, cities have planned development and built infrastructure to mitigate floods, wildfires, and storms, but heat has largely been a silent, invisible hazard. A major focus of my work is understanding how cities are (or aren’t) planning for extreme heat. Through national surveys of U.S. planners and comprehensive plan evaluations, we analyze how communities integrate heat mitigation into their built environments. This includes developing tools such as the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard™ (PIRS™) for Heat, which helps cities spatially evaluate their networks of plans, and co-authoring the American Planning Association’s foundational guidebook on Planning for Urban Heat Resilience.

Heat Governance

Similar to urban planning, society as a whole has not addressed extreme heat as a hazard until recently. My research in heat governance explores how institutions, actors, and processes are addressing extreme heat across disciplines, sectors, and levels, from local and regional to national and global. This includes documenting the emergence of Chief Heat Officers, evaluating the effectiveness of heat action plans, and analyzing how policymakers implement policies and assess outcomes. Our work, including a call for dedicated heat governance published in Nature, shows that addressing extreme heat is as much a political and organizational challenge as a climatological one. It also points to the scale at which heat has to be governed: the heatshed, the regional area that heat crosses regardless of city, county, and state lines.

Applied Transdisciplinary Research

Beyond high-level planning and governance, I study how heat affects microclimates and human thermal comfort. By combining microclimate data with public health outcomes, this research looks at the immediate, ground-level realities of extreme heat. Recent studies include evaluating physical exertion and heat-related illness in the Arizona borderlands, identifying rural heat health disparities, addressing inequities in cooling center access, and measuring extreme heat risks at outdoor community sites.

Planning for Climate Futures

Long-range urban planning typically has a ten-year time horizon, but even if we take drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, climate change will affect our cities and future generations for millennia. While much of my current research focuses on addressing the present impacts of the climate crisis, I am also interested in exploring how we plan for the very long term: how will humanity survive and thrive in increasingly extreme environments on an overheated planet?

Research programs

Completed research

For a full list of publications, see my Google Scholar profile or CV.