The City of Richmond released a guide to heat-mitigating infrastructure in late June — right as Congress debated cutting programs that forecast extreme heat and provide partnerships and funding for localities seeking to cool things down.
The Richmond Cool Kit doesn’t contain proposals for specific projects. Instead, it lays out a wide variety of cooling strategies that the city says it plans to apply to future infrastructure work.
The strategies range from large to small. Depaving impervious surfaces like unused parking lots and replacing them with trees and other plants or simply putting up foldable shade canopies when it’s hot and sunny are both recommended, depending on the context.
In other words, the document covers everything from expensive infrastructure work to strategies that Richmonders can implement in their day-to-day lives to protect themselves and their neighbors.
Richmond suffers from the urban heat island effect. It makes some parts of the city 10 or more degrees Fahrenheit hotter than other, shadier spots — making them dangerous places to be on hot, sunny days.
But heat is not limited to urban settings. Huge swaths of the country, including Virginia, recently endured a scorching heat dome. The Virginia Department of Health recorded nearly 500 heat-related emergency room visits over a two-day span during the event, which sent feels-like temperature highs into the 100s for over a week in parts of the state. (Feels-like temperatures, like the heat index, more accurately reflect the effects of extreme heat on our bodies — humidity, direct sun and a lack of wind can all contribute to higher feels-like temperatures.)
As temperatures have gotten higher over the past two decades, localities and individuals increasingly rely on federal programs to help out.
That help often comes through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whether it’s forecasts and information through the National Integrated Heat Health Information System or grants for heat mitigation projects or research.
But funding for the NIHHIS, as well as the Climate Smart Communities Initiative and Climate Adaptation Partnerships, is zeroed out in the budget bill President Donald Trump signed on Friday.
Cuts to the National Weather Service during President Donald Trump’s second term have also been scrutinized, especially after Texas residents said they were caught off guard by devastating flooding this weekend.
Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy Program, said gaps in weather forecasting and communication will likely become more noticeable.
“The weather person, the weather app that you have on your phone that gives you specialized weather alerts… all of those come from NOAA data,” Declet-Barreto said. “Those apps in those services are dead in the water without NOAA data.
He said the cuts in the budget match the “wrecking ball approach” to climate science taken by the Trump administration thus far.
Declet-Barreto called Trump’s approach “a move designed to hide the footprint of climate change, because that then helps relieve the pressure of policymakers or the fossil fuel industry of the administration to do what they need to do to address the climate crisis.”
Richmond has benefited from NOAA funding in its own path to setting climate goals and meeting those goals.
A study showing extreme temperature disparities across Richmond that has been cited repeatedly in city climate work — and replicated in other cities around the country — was funded in part by NOAA grants. And the city took money directly from the federal agency in 2022 to fund an environmental education program led by the parks department.
And Richmond’s own climate plans, which center around heat as a dominant effect of climate change in the city, hinge on outside investment. City leaders and nonprofits have repeatedly looked to funding from programs established under former President Joe Biden, much of which has since dried up or been clawed back, to implement their plans.
Declet-Barreto says those impacts will not be evenly felt: Some big, hot cities have enough funding of their own to run robust heat mitigation programs.
“There's going to be a large difference between what places like Los Angeles, Miami-Dade County and Phoenix have been doing, for example … versus what small rural localities or small underfunded towns can do,” he said.
And he’s not convinced that other potential funders will step up to fill the gaps: “What incentive does the private sector have to do this? This is a social service.”
The City of Richmond did not respond to a request for comment on the changing landscape of federal climate funding. The city is currently implementing its “Cool the City” initiative, a wide-ranging program funded by the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
