In one of my morning update emails… preaching to the choir:
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Planting more trees in cities would save lives.More than a third of all heat-related deaths in the world from 2000 to 2019 could’ve been avoided with more vegetation in urban zones, researchers in Australia reported this week. According to their model of temperatures and greenness across 11,000 urban areas, boosting flora by 30% in areas with a lot of concrete would have reduced average summer heat by about one-third of a degree Fahrenheit, potentially preventing 37% of heat-related deaths from 2000 to 2019 (equivalent to 1.16 million lives). The
cooling power of trees and other vegetation is becoming increasingly critical—the study’s lead researcher projected that heat exposure would cause more than 15% of deaths in Southeast Asia in the last decade of the century “under the most extreme global warming scenarios.”