Dr. Andrea Armstrong-Pulinx on… NBS for Extreme Heat Resilience
Urban Voices #43, November 2025
Dr. Andrea Armstrong-Pulinx
Dr. Andrea Armstrong-Pulinx BSc Ph.D. is an urban geographer, a transdisciplinary researcher, Research Director of Silent Spring Consultants, with former roles at Durham University (UK), Vrije Universiteit Brussels and currently the Maastricht Sustainability Institute. She specialises in cities, climate change, nature-based solutions, environmental justice, and community engagement. Most recently she led the BeBrit Extreme Heat Risk project, focusing on city responses to rising temperatures.
BeBrit - Extreme Heat Risk ProjectAs the lead of the BeBrit project, you have examined how national and local systems can prepare for extreme heat. Could you tell us more about the project’s main goals and key findings?
Extreme heat and drought accelerate global climate threats. The 2022 European heatwave, marked by unprecedented temperatures in regions ill-prepared for such extremes, demonstrated the urgency of accelerating adaptation. Urban areas face particularly acute risks due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, where heatwaves intersect with inequalities in health, housing, gender, age, and socio-economic status. Although some national and city governments have heat-health plans, it is not nearly enough.
The BeBrit Extreme Heat Risk project, which I led, responds directly to this gap. It examined how Belgium, the UK, and a wider set of global cities prepare for and govern extreme heat, with a focus on decision-making processes, communication strategies, and institutional coordination. The project had three central aims: learning from case studies, comparing countries’ responses to heat risk, and promoting knowledge exchange.
A major contribution of BeBrit is its outputs designed to support policy and practice. These include global city case studies covering Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. We also produced city action posters that translate best practices on outdoor cooling, communication, building design, tools and building regulation into easy-to-use guidance for local leaders, and a policy brief for managing extreme heat in urban areas outlining recommendations on governance and coordination, adapting the built environment, ensuring adequate resources and financial planning, communicating and building public awareness, preparedness in health and social services and continued research to fill knowledge gaps. Together, these outputs provide a comprehensive evidence base to support more coordinated, just, and effective extreme heat preparedness.
Extreme heat is increasingly recognised as both an environmental and public health emergency. Which heat-related health risks or challenges do you believe remain most overlooked, and how can we address them more effectively?
Despite increasing awareness, several health risks remain overlooked. One is the cumulative impact of prolonged heat, particularly high night-time temperatures that prevent physiological recovery. This sustained exposure greatly increases risks for older adults, infants, and people with chronic conditions.
Occupational exposure is another area that receives too little attention. Outdoor and manual workers, such as those in construction, agriculture, logistics, military, emergency services and delivery services, face extreme risks, yet labour protections remain limited or inconsistently applied. Further, heat stress protocols, mandatory breaks, and access to shade or cooling are still far from standard practice.
Social inequality also shapes heat risk in ways that are often overlooked in policy conversations. People living in poorly insulated housing, low-income households, migrants, and those without access to green spaces or air-cooling face significantly increased exposure. Yet these communities are often missing from emergency planning processes, and current public messaging rarely reflects their everyday realities. Heat is fundamentally a social justice issue, and addressing it requires a combination of structural and public health measures and sustained, systemic attention to inequality.
Heat is fundamentally a social justice issue, and addressing it requires a combination of structural and public health measures and sustained, systemic attention to inequality.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are gaining traction as powerful tools for urban cooling and wellbeing. How did BeBrit explore the role of urban nature in strengthening heat resilience and improving public health outcomes?
Nature-based solutions were an important part of the BeBrit project, building on my long-standing research interest in this area. Through my work on two EU Horizon 2020 projects—NATURVATION and CLEARING HOUSE—and my publications on NBS, I explored how urban nature supports climate resilience, public health, biodiversity, and social wellbeing. This background shaped the project’s analytical approach and helped us critically assess how NBS contribute to heat resilience in diverse urban contexts.
Within BeBrit, we examined the role of NBS through policy analysis, interviews, a stakeholder workshop, and our global city case studies to find out what role green infrastructure—such as parks, tree-lined streets, river corridors, living roofs, wetlands, and community gardens—plays as a response to extreme heat.
Our case studies across Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America revealed a variety of effective approaches, such as Lisbon’s urban forest planning, Guangzhou’s blue–green corridors, and the expansion of shaded mobility routes in Brussels. Each example demonstrated that NBS can act as multifunctional systems delivering climate adaptation, environmental quality, and public health benefits simultaneously. Without intentional design, the cooling and wellbeing benefits of urban nature can be unevenly distributed, leaving already vulnerable communities behind.
Overall, NBS are not only environmental interventions but essential public health and climate adaptation tools. They offer accessible, low-carbon, and socially grounded approaches to building urban resilience in a warming world.
From your experience, are NBS changing the way urban leaders think about heat resilience? Could you share a successful example where this shift in practice is already visible?
Yes, there is a shift in how urban leaders view the role of NBS. Increasingly, they are seen not as optional environmental amenities but as essential components of urban resilience, public health, and climate adaptation. In Brussels, heat mitigation strategies integrate cooling corridors, shaded mobility routes, and expanded tree canopies. These interventions are linked to public health, sustainable mobility, and social inclusion objectives, signalling a systemic approach to heat resilience. In the UK, London is incorporating cooling and shading benefits into their urban greening plans, using data from heat vulnerability mapping to prioritise action in underserved neighbourhoods. These cases illustrate how NBS can transform urban governance by raising awareness to the benefits of embedding nature-positive planning infrastructure for more resilient, socially inclusive cities.
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