Ladd Keith, Ph.D.

Research

I’m an interdisciplinary scientist at the University of Arizona, where I help governments protect people from a changing climate. Because we live in an overheating world, my research focuses on designing the planning and governance tools required to keep our cities livable. By bridging the gap among climate science, urban planning, and public policy, my team translates complex environmental challenges into actionable frameworks that build community resilience.

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, regional, national, and global. This includes documenting the emergence of Chief Heat Officers, evaluating the effectiveness of dedicated heat action plans, and analyzing how policymakers implement policies and assess outcomes. Our work—including advocacy for dedicated heat governance published in Nature—highlights that addressing extreme heat is as much a political and organizational challenge as it is a climatological one.

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