New interactive heat map to help Darwin residents stay cool in a warming world
It’s called the Darwin Living Lab and has been developed by Australia’s CSIRO during a 10-year project supported by the Australian and Northern Territory Governments and City of Darwin.
By “using real-world experiments” to measure “improvements in liveability, sustainability and resilience”, the lab looks at ways to reduce heat impacts on the Northern Territory’s tropical capital. Its release follows recent research documenting the threat to Darwin’s future of rising temperatures linked to human-driven global warming.
That research includes work by an international team of researchers who released a paper in 2023 warning that, if global temperatures keep rising at current rates, then a huge swathe of northern Australia, including Darwin, will become increasingly difficult for humans to live in.
Then, in January this year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) – the United Nations’ climate organisation – confirmed that in 2024 global temperatures exceeded the 1.5 degrees celsius Paris Agreement threshold.
Real-world useability
Researchers say Darwin residents, businesses, urban planners and policy makers can use the Darwin Living Lab portal to assess the heat exposure of neighbourhoods and gain ideas about how to lower their heat stress.
This might include planting more trees, taking advantage of the cooling effects of cross-breeze ventilation or painting roofs a lighter colour.
CSIRO’s Urban Living Labs leader, Dr Tim Muster, explained that Darwin is rapidly getting hotter.
“From 1981 to 2010 Darwin experienced around 11 days [a year] with temperatures over 35 degrees, which is predicted under a moderate climate scenario to increase to 43 days [a year] over 35 degrees by 2030 and 111 days [a year] over 35 degrees by 2090,” he said.
“In 2019 Darwin Airport registered an unprecedented 45 days over 35 degrees and in 2020 it was 42 days over 35 degrees. So, those forward predictions for 2030 are already being achieved.
“Our partners in Darwin recognise that they have got a challenge around heat but also sustainability. Darwin effectively uses twice as much energy and twice as much water as any other capital. So, there is a sustainability and a resilience challenge there.”
Trees as a heat stress solution
Dr Muster said the impact of rising temperatures on Darwin has been worsened by 2018’s Cyclone Marcus, which destroyed about a third of the city’s tree canopy.
He explained that the research team studied aerial photography of Darwin’s tree cover and compared that with heat distribution spatial analysis and socio-economic census data to develop a heat health vulnerability index for the city.
CSIRO research is already being applied by the City of Darwin to design strategies for cooling the city, and replacing the trees destroyed by Cyclone Marcus is a key part of adapting to rising heat.
“We know trees shade, we know they cool through evaporative transpiration, they’re good for our wellbeing and they take in carbon dioxide. So, it makes sense that if you are trying to mitigate heat then that’s a solution,” Dr Muster said.
Darwin’s Lord Mayor, Kon Vatskalis, told Australian Geographic that the City of Darwin had “declared a Climate Emergency in 2019 after becoming concerned about the escalation of climate impacts in our city”.
“We have already implemented a number of actions to ensure our city is cool, clean and green, including continued investment in greening,” Mr Vatskalis said.
“Our urban forest is comprised of more than 100,000 trees and we continue to add to that figure. We hold regular native plant giveaways and community planting days, giving away over 15,000 native plants every financial year and planting more than 4000 plants into revegetation sites across Darwin annually.
“Increasing our urban tree canopy helps to provide shade and cooling, capture and store carbon, improve streetscape amenity, mitigate stormwater flows, increase cyclone resilience and improve community connection to nature.”
Real-world risks and experiments
CSIRO also runs an Urban Living Lab in Western Sydney, where temperatures often rise far higher than in other parts of Sydney closer to the coast.
“For us as a national science agency we are saying ‘where can we find places that either need to change or are undergoing significant change and how can we be in those spaces for a longer period of time to build the relationships, the collaborations and the capacity to change and to do things differently?’” Dr Muster explained.
“How can we enable more experiments to be tried in the real world so that we can start to be able to do things not just incrementally differently, but can we find a way to overcome these lock-in effects?
“There are multiple risks and challenges that we need to be aware of. If you don’t try to make some change then it makes you more vulnerable.”
