It's getting hot in here. What are we going to do about it?

LA has one.

Melbourne has one.

Miami has one.

Athens has one.

Dhaka has one.

UN-Habitat has one.

What are they? Let's come back to that.

A few headlines:

"Hong Kong Observatory records scorching 35.1°C, breaks annual high"

"Hong Kong records hottest April in at least 140 years, with average temp. of 26.5°C. The subtropical Chinese city has faced extreme heat in recent years, with dozens of high-temperature records, including daily and monthly highs, set annually since 2019, observatory data showed."

"Hong Kong’s hottest summer fell hardest on most vulnerable"

"AXA launches Hong Kong’s first heatwave insurance to protect outdoor workers"

...begin to see a theme?

Talking about the weather isn't just for the British any more. The single most recurrent conversation this summer in Hong Kong hasn't been about the economy, politics, wars and conflicts, or holiday destinations - it's been about the heat and how debilitating it's become.

Hong Kong is an incredible, iconic, attractive city. Its extreme density enables some great outcomes, such as its world-beating public transport mode share. But it also has some well-rehearsed negative aspects, not just around extreme land values and housing prices but also a sense that all aspects of the public realm could be improved. Many in the urban development community - urban designers, planners, architects, engineers - spend much time and effort at myriad events, talking about ways to bring positive change to Hong Kong's built environment; but the ways of doing things that have delivered the existing metropolis are deeply embedded and it is not clear to see how visible, palpable improvements can be effected.

The question I keep asking myself is: what individual things could be done that could have systemic effects?

One ignored element is the urban heat island effect within the built-up areas.

If you're in Hong Kong, look around you. There is very little greening on streets, building facades or roofs. Literally millions of split and window air conditioners belch heat out of the sides of tall buildings, making streets and urban canyons hotter, re-heating the buildings themselves and in turn increasing heating loads. Buildings themselves are mostly constructed with single-pane glazing and little or no insulation, so the sun and ambient heat have a greater effect than places where buildings are better-insulated (and concomitant demand for cooling is thus greater, feeding back into the amounts of heat rejected into the city from air conditioning units). There is no shading and active cooling through fans or misting of outdoor areas; where there is shading, it creates more of a greenhouse effect (try taking the Mid-Levels Escalator on a hot day and you'll feel much hotter than walking on the street alongside it). An increasing percentage of cars are electric vehicles; but trucks, buses, and two-wheelers driving and idling by the side of the road (after all, you can't expect the driver to not keep the air conditioning on) are all powered by internal combustion engines, which create enormous amounts of heat precisely where people are walking or working.

If you're reading this, chances are you're one of the lucky ones. You're probably right now looking at a big screen in an air-conditioned office, or maybe reading on your phone in an air-conditioned coffee shop. You're not a construction worker, or doing maintenance outdoors, or making food deliveries on a hot motorbike powered by a noisy, dirty two-stroke engine (wouldn't it be amazing if e-bikes were legal and delivery drivers could use them to get up hills instead of having to rely on dirty, hot ICE-powered scooters?). But then even you are likely to be walking on the street for a few minutes between appointments and feeling the heat.

It's getting hotter. The urban heat island effect will continue to be disproportionate in making Hong Kong's urban areas unlivable. The way of developing, building and managing the physical city which has prevailed for long needs to be rethought through the lens of heat. And that in turn would bring great benefits for livability generally: for an ageing society, for the most vulnerable people in the city, for the health of the general population, for people working outdoors, for the economy, for the drive to Net Zero, for resiliency.

So let's go back to the beginning. All those cities (and UN-Habitat) have Chief Heat Officers. People who are tasked, and crucially, empowered to look at all the elements that make their cities hotter, and work to counteract them, identifying and enabling virtuous rather than vicious cycles.

Dhaka is the first city in Asia to have a Chief Heat Officer. Could Hong Kong be the first city in East Asia?