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Anson Stevens-Bollen

Overheated

City planners are striving to understand how and where Santa Fe is getting hotter and how to adapt, but the heat is already lethal

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On July 28, a deliberately chosen scorcher of a sunny day, nearly 20 volunteers set out to collect data on just how hot Santa Fe has become and which neighborhoods are getting the worst of it.

They picked up a sensor from a city staffer at Fort Marcy to hang out a car window, then drove an hour-long route through the city in the morning, afternoon and evening, targeting different environments and different populations thought to be at risk. As the temperature climbed toward a high of 97 degrees, the teams of two—one driver and one navigator—meandered narrow, shady streets downtown then cruised Cerrillos Road and looped by schools, apartment complexes, homeless shelters, parks, trailheads, senior centers and blocks of manufactured homes. As temperatures around the world rise, they were recording details on how that plays out around town.

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Heat sensor affixed to a car window

Courtesy Mickey Fong / City of Santa Fe

Volunteers drove through Santa Fe with sensors affixed to car windows to measure temperatures.

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Daniel Alvarado

Elizabeth Miller

Daniel Alvarado, a planner for the City of Santa Fe, hopped into a car to join a study of local hotspots, touring neighborhoods he doesn’t often visit and contemplating more climate-friendly designs.

Cities change the climate within themselves. Buildings and asphalt absorb and then release heat, raising temperatures. Car engines and air conditioners add to the effect. In these so-called urban heat islands, the hottest pockets can see double-digit temperature differences between inside a city’s interior and its surrounding undeveloped areas. The goal is to use this fine-scale data for both long-range planning as the city revises its general plan and updates its codes and short-term mitigation efforts to keep people safe.

“What’s great about this study is that it’s a lot more granular than remote-sensing technology because we’re actually on the ground, getting real-time data rather than satellite data,” says Daniel Alvarado, senior planner and land development code review project manager for the City of Santa Fe.

This data will zero in, he says, down to the street intersection.

The city won a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Urban Heat Island Mapping Campaign for the research. Alvarado’s task is to track the study, then, as a city planner, incorporate those findings into measures to head off a health crisis that can’t even be considered brewing anymore. The crisis is already here, injuring hundreds of people in New Mexico every year and killing dozens—and those numbers may grossly underrepresent the problem. The implications reach not just public health but quality of life and even student performance. Deploying fast solutions results in a patchwork of efforts rolling out and, long-term, could compel rethinking how people live, commute and even take their kids to school.

Epidemiologists with the New Mexico Department of Health in 2020 released a report forecasting that by 2030, the number of heat-related calls for emergency services would double from what was reported through 2015. But the number of these calls has already more than doubled. The number of fatalities has quadrupled.

“It has happened already,” says Srikanth Paladugu, bureau chief of Environmental Health Epidemiology with the Public Health Division. “That’s an unfortunate thing to say, but yes, it has happened, and there is need for immediate action.”

Those emergency room visits are linked to the growing number of hot days. Between 1970 and 2015, average annual maximum temperature in New Mexico increased 3.3 degrees. Study after study has concluded that climate change makes extreme heat more likely—here, in the Pacific Northwest, in China, in Africa.

Between 2012 and 2015, emergency room visits for heat-related illness in New Mexico averaged 300 per year, with 28 hospitalizations. In 2020, when epidemiologists modeled how much temperature was supposed to climb and used 90 degrees as a threshold for when emergency room visits for heat-related illness would ramp up, they forecasted a total of about 630. In 2023, health officials counted 912 heat-related emergency room visits.

This year, the state has again surpassed that projection, with 805 heat-related illness emergency room visits between April 1 and Aug. 21, and 22 deaths between April 1 and June 15. The Office of the Medical Investigator’s reports from July, when fatalities typically peak, and August are not yet available, but the state has already surpassed the total from 2022. The New Mexico Urban Heat Cohort has reported the rate of heat-related deaths was 10 times higher in 2021 than it was in 2013.

The official tally captures people who show up with classic symptoms of heat related illness or heat stroke—dizziness, headache, extreme sweating, a rapid pulse, light-headedness. Nathaniel Matthews-Trigg, co-founder of Healthy Climate New Mexico, a group of more than 130 health professionals trying to increase awareness of how climate change is affecting public health, says it misses the scores of people for whom chronic heat exposure has exacerbated other health issues.

“The numbers we see that the Department of Health puts out is really just a small sliver of what the actual number is,” Matthews-Trigg says. “We’re not capturing all the times that someone working out in their garden in the hot temperatures contributed to them having a stroke or a heart attack, worsening their diabetes, giving them acute kidney failure.”

A 2023 report from the World Meteorological Organization, which assesses health services for the United Nations as the climate changes, estimated the number of people being killed by extreme heat may be as much as 30 times higher than what emergency departments count. Extreme heat is now known to kill more people in most years than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined.

“It’s shocking,” Matthews-Trigg says. “When you talk about this crisis that we’re currently in, it is a real crisis. It is an invisible crisis to many because we just don’t have those numbers.”

Because the systems are not calibrated to recognize when extreme heat triggers a cascade of other health effects, local governments can miss what are effectively mass casualty events, and then the opportunity to seek state or federal funding to head off the next heat wave. Matthews-Trigg sees people with chronic exposure, such as outdoor workers or the unhoused, and people with chronic diseases that can be exacerbated by heat as most impacted. Even kids—who might not know that dizziness while playing or during sports practice means it is time to sit down in the shade and drink some water—are at risk. And often, people go to the ER, recover and then return to the conditions that made them sick.

“We just see this cycle of vulnerability,” Matthews-Trigg says.

The grant the City of Santa Fe received to map urban heat connected them with a contractor who has run similar studies across the country. Alvarado expects to see their analysis and maps in the next couple of weeks.

“It’s a really good tool for showing the immediate effects of climate change and how our local development patterns impact people’s daily lives,” Alvarado says. “We are seeing the effects of climate change and it’s heating up in the summer and monsoons seem to be less predictable. It’s something that we have to consider.”

But what can a city planner do to address a health crisis? Local development patterns have created these urban heat islands, and now face the prospect of trying to solve the problem. Painting rooftops or streets lighter colors or with reflective materials could reflect rather than absorb heat, but might create slick surfaces when wet, and “green roofs,” where a rooftop is covered in plants, can also curb nearby heat islands, though they’d need to be drought-tolerant plants to avoid draining already tight water resources. The cornerstone solution comes down to planting more trees and creating more green spaces like gardens, parks and urban farms, which all cool the surrounding air. But hotter, drier conditions also make it harder for trees to grow. The city could look to artificial shade structures, Alvarado says. But what creates welcome pockets of shade in the summer would incubate patches of ice in winter, requiring additional maintenance.

In some ways, building smarter for the future will mean looking to the past. Santa Fe’s signature style protects people from heat—adobe bricks mean indoor spaces heat more slowly, and structures like portales provide shade. Building a more heat-proof city could also cue significant shifts in design. It might mean walkable neighborhoods with tree-lined streets dominated by pedestrians, rather than cars. Imagine major thoroughfares, such as Cerrillos Road—where Alvarado expects to see a streak of higher temperatures on the heat map—transformed to boulevards lined with trees and shade structures that make it pleasant to wait for a bus or walk among clusters of residences and businesses. Kids could walk or bike to school, rather than being driven, an approach that has planted schools in sunbaked islands of asphalt.

Such denser development might resemble what’s already found in some downtown neighborhoods, like the Alto Park area that hosted the mid-August Portalfest, a porch music festival in celebration of that architectural trait, Santa Fe urbanism and closer communities. But that neighborhood would be illegal under current code, Alvarado says. Among other rules, roads have to be wider to accommodate fire trucks, even though most emergency services calls don’t require a fire engine.

“There are certain solutions that then come up against modern development standards that America has put out that demand things like wide roads and big parking lots,” Alvarado says. “Those are the challenges we have to deal with to reframe, what is public safety—is it, ‘Can they get a giant truck there in five minutes?’ Or ‘Can we safely walk around our neighborhood and have a high quality of life without the fear of getting hit by a car?’”

City staff are revising development codes, but how far the changes can stretch to accommodate visions like this one isn’t yet clear. And all of it has to be executed with a firm grip on affordable housing and anti-displacement measures, and with the hope that private investment will flow toward public investment. The redevelopment of Midtown—where the city planners have made way for denser development but investment has been slow, leaving a corridor of strip malls and car dealerships—demonstrates another potential pitfall and slow progress ahead.

“Land use patterns are a huge driver of localized heat island effect,” Alvarado says. But, he adds, “It is a solution where you put it in place and then you see the results 20, 30, 40 years later.”

Already, even just the satellite data has made it clear this heat island effect mirrors other problems, says Carlos Matutes, Albuquerque community advocate for national environmentalist organization GreenLatinos.

“With urban heating, especially in a place like Santa Fe, you have a disparity that is very largely drawn along racial lines,” he says. “In places where you do have higher concentrations of Latino populations, those heat effects are significantly higher, and we’re talking about a difference of close to 20 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.”

Urban heat closely correlates to generational poverty and economic injustice based on racial differences, Matutes says. Less wealth correlates to fewer mature trees, fewer greenspaces, even former agricultural land that’s been “sucked dry,” he says, and more asphalt, more concrete and more buildings. Nationally, communities of color are more likely to occupy urban heat islands. Latinos are three times more likely to die from heat on the job than non-Latinos, according to the Hispanic Access Foundation. (The notes health care providers submit to the New Mexico Department of Health are so patchy on demographics and context for when heat made someone sick that the department cautions against reaching such conclusions from state-level data.)

The number of extremely hot days has increased, but so has the number of warm nights. Without evening chill, opening windows and doors to let indoor spaces cool overnight isn’t as effective, and the toll starts to pile up on both physical and mental health. Bodies don’t have time to recover from the heat of the day, and hot nights can become sleepless. People can become irritable, more aggressive, even more prone to abuse. The National Institute of Mental Health now recognizes summer-pattern seasonal affective disorder—a shift to a sadder mood, lower energy level and difficulty concentrating or sleeping that’s more often linked to winter’s brief daylight hours. In summer, heat can lead to depression, and feelings of overwhelm, stress and even suicide.

GreenLatinos has projects underway to add greenspaces in Albuquerque such as planting trees or, perhaps preferably, Matutes says, urban farming projects to shrink food deserts and reduce food insecurity while lowering temperatures. Where they’ve planted edible gardens, he says, “We’re actually decreasing urban heating by a significant amount.”

The organization is starting a project in Los Alamos County soon, and Matutes says his dream is to expand to Santa Fe and San Miguel counties. He cites a proverb about trees: The best time to plant one is 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now.

Still, while we contemplate overhauling where we live and how we commute, severe heat is already here. So Santa Fe’s heat mapping data will also inform short-term mitigation efforts, like where to center outreach efforts to elderly or low-income residents in homes without air conditioning, and where to open cooling centers.

City of Santa Fe Community Services Director Maria Sanchez-Tucker refers people to public library branches, as well as the Mary Esther Gonzales Senior Center for anyone over 60, and the Genoveva Chavez Community Center, perhaps to sit on the ice rink to cool off—though the rink has been closed for repairs since June. And the effectiveness of these solutions can be limited. People concerned about leaving pets in hot homes might not come to a public space that doesn’t allow animals. They might not feel comfortable sharing space with the mixed personalities and socioeconomics a cooling center could draw. Those buildings may also close for the day well before the heat lets up. And of course, there are markers of poverty and privilege here: If the advice is to go to a cooling center during a heat wave and someone doesn’t own a car, getting there can be impractical.

The Office of Emergency Management has also distributed fans to the Interfaith Shelter and drinking water for libraries and park rangers to hand out. The Alternative Response Unit has also been alerted to transport people to cooling spaces and provide water, which can reduce chronic dehydration, avoiding kidney damage. Paladugu, with the Department of Health, encourages checking in on vulnerable populations through a heat wave, including children, elderly people, people with chronic medical conditions and pregnant people.

On Aug. 19, the Department of Health issued a heat advisory as forecasted highs topped 95 degrees in northern New Mexico and more than 100 degrees for southern New Mexico. The prolonged heat wave was expected to drag on through the end of the month. They alerted local governments, as well as the Public Education Department.

Schools present a microcosm of the problems here. Three schools in Rio Rancho delayed opening by one day because air conditioning units weren’t working, and students and staff would face excessively hot classrooms. School teachers in Albuquerque have repeatedly complained about overheating classrooms, with some air conditioning units or swamp coolers failing to meet the task of cutting temperatures when they climb above 90 degrees. While covering rising temps earlier this month, KOB4 reporter Brittany Costello wrote, “This is something we get calls about every single year. And every single year, we ask what is it going to take [to keep] teachers, staff, and students comfortable and safe from the heat?”

But it’s not limited to the southern part of the state. A nationwide analysis by the Center for Climate Integrity, a Washington, DC-based advocacy group that focuses on putting a dollar figure on climate change and holding fossil fuel companies responsible for them, found nearly 40 percent of schools were built before the 1970s, a time of cooler temperatures. Now, at least one month of school days sees temperatures above 80 degrees in many places around the country, including Santa Fe, and many of those places still do not have air conditioning or will need upgraded cooling equipment to address rising temperatures.

The report estimated schools in New Mexico could face spending $171.8 million to install air conditioners, and another $6.7 million every year to keep them running. About 304,600 students were affected. Santa Fe Public Schools was projected to face the highest equipment costs in the state at $48.9 million, with 12,240 students impacted by another 21 hot days per year. Gallup-McKinley, Grants-Cibola and Taos school districts also face millions in equipment costs.

“New Mexico, in general, has this issue of just a disparity of districts in terms of what the resources are,” adds Paul Chinowsky, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of that report. “So you’ve got a real problem where some districts are going to be able to afford to do this and some districts really aren’t.”

That’ll show up in widening achievement gaps. A study from the Harvard Kennedy School of 10 million PSAT-takers found that a 1 degree hotter school year reduced that year’s learning by 1 percent as kids struggle to stay focused and learn in warm classrooms. Hot school days also accounted for about 5 percent of the racial achievement gap. Air conditioning, they found, largely offset those effects.

But in addition to installing more cooling equipment, schools may have to reconsider kids’ experience in recess, after school sports practice, marching band practice—even waiting for and riding school buses.

“You’re already behind if you haven’t started thinking about this,” Chinowsky says.

To the idea of starting school in early August, he says, “It’s crazy. Whoever is thinking this is a good idea—it’s a bad idea. And I guarantee you there’s probably no place in the country that has schools with A/C that can handle the heat that’s going on in the country right now.”

Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all of this is that no one should have to die from the heat: “Heat-related illness is something that’s totally preventable,” Paladugu says. “People should be aware of the signs and symptoms and take necessary precautions.”

The Department of Health focuses on outreach; they can’t make rules or change, for example, workplace standards. But the New Mexico Environment Department has been working on rules and recommendations to protect workers from heat sickness, like taking short breaks; having access to water and electrolytes throughout the day; possible cooling rooms; and creating a buddy system so people watch out for one another. Those could become statute in the next legislative session.

That session will likely also see the return of a bill to create a dedicated Public Health and Climate Resiliency Program at the Department of Health to which millions could be allocated. In 2021, more than 200 medical journals signed on to a joint statement that declared climate change the greatest threat to public health globally, Matthews-Trigg says, and yet the New Mexico Department of Health has just .2 full-time equivalent staff hours dedicated to it.

“We know this is just incredibly inadequate,” he says. “There really needs to be more staff and more resources dedicated to this issue.”

Without these programs, Matthews-Trigg says, health officials are left lacking even adequate baselines on the current impacts, and thus an ability to measure how effective any interventions deployed might be.

The Inflation Reduction Act released a flood of federal funding for community resiliency projects like greenspaces to reduce urban heat islands, Matutes says. But some grant applications run more than 90 pages, and there’s a shortage of grant writers.

Globally, July saw the three hottest days on record. In remarks just after those record-breaking days, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “It’s summertime. But the living is no longer easy.”

He referred to an “extreme heat epidemic” that saw temperatures top 122 degrees, and listed the impacts: Heat shuts down tourist attractions, closes schools and kills people. Infrastructure buckles. Crops fail. Pressure climbs on already strained electricity grids. The urban poor, the sick, the displaced and the impoverished all suffer more. And heat isn’t the only symptom of climate change, he continued: Increasingly intense storms, more wildfires, droughts and rising sea levels all point to the sickness.

“To tackle all these symptoms, we need to fight the disease,” Guterres continued. “The disease is the madness of incinerating our only home. The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels. The disease is climate inaction.”