By James Purtill
Parts of Victoria and NSW are sweating through an extreme heatwave that started sweeping across Australia's southeast on Saturday.
This may seem like just a good excuse to go to the beach, but as the planet warms and summers become longer and less bearable, heatwaves are coming to represent an existential threat to Australian suburbs.
[...]
Now, faced with the prospect of 50-degree-plus summers, experts say highly urbanised parts of Australia may become unliveable within decades.
The race is on to re-imagine, redesign and rebuild the Australian suburb.
[...]
Since 2019, all 33 Sydney councils have been funding a climate adaptation program that has identified heat as the number-one climate threat to Sydneysiders.
"We are not yet building a city that's really equipping our people to survive and adapt extreme heat," says Beck Dawson, who heads the Resilience Sydney program.
[...]
Action on heat takes two forms: mitigation and adaptation.
Mitigation is reducing the ambient air temperature itself (through planting trees or using heat-reflective materials), while adaptation aims to soften the impact of high temperatures (such as building houses with insulated roofs and double-glazed windows).
[...]