Increasing summer temperatures and urban development in Western Sydney present key challenges for contemporary planning. This research shows that increasing the area of hard surfaces and buildings leads to warming while increasing the area of open spaces and tree canopy leads to cooling.

Analyses provided in this report will assist the development of the most effective tree planting strategies for each of Sydney’s 100 hot schools.

Based on empirical data collections, this report provides more than twenty practical recommendations on how to reduce the impacts of outdoor heat.

This report documents variation of summer temperatures across Penrith, in Western Sydney. Between 14 December 2019 and 31 March 2020, more than 1.4 million measurements of air temperatures were collected using 120 data loggers.

The compounding effects of climate change and rapid urbanisation cause cities to heat up. The communities of Campbelltown City in the southern region of the Greater Sydney Basin already experience extreme summer temperatures and heatwave conditions. Until now, the magnitude of air temperature variation in...