This paper details the approach and progress being made by the cross-sectoral Shade Working Goup (SWG) across health and the built environment to embed natural and built quality shade provision in places used by the community in New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

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.

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 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.