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.

Documenting canopy coverage and identifying suitable climate change resilient street tree species, this project will contribute to cooler localised urban environments, increasing community resilience in heat events and raise awareness of climate change resilience within the community.

This research takes up the challenge of promoting a new approach to thinking about urban liveability in warming cities, with two principles at its core. First, asking how open space can be planned for ‘coolth’ defined as the experience of feeling manageably comfortable in a hot city; and second, how coolth can be connected with...

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.

Extreme heat associated with the Urban Heat Island (UHI) and future climate change will have a disproportional geographic and demographic impact across a city. This research investigates Australian cities' strategic plans for heat reduction to maintain their liveability towards heat stress from the UHI effect.