Cooling Interventions

The past decade has been the hottest ever on record in Boston. In response, Mayor Wu is taking an all-of-government approach to addressing extreme heat. Multiple departments are working together to implement a variety of immediate and long-term heat mitigation strategies.

MONUM helped these departments collaborate on new and innovative cooling interventions and led the implementation of BCYF Cool Spots, outdoor misting towers, pop up cooling stations, and more! This work not only helped to cool the city, but it also helped the Office of Emergency Management expand its work in this area by identifying projects for a new full time role and piloting new management systems.

• We need to simultaneously scale up this work, and center it in the hands of the community - tailoring this work to community needs, and working with CBOs to ensure we are using the right resources in the correct places will be integral to our success moving forward.
• Logistics needs to be front and center in planning for emergency heat. We found that the original “check out” model of deploying cooling interventions stretched our logistics team thin and delayed deployments.  In the future, we are working on having interventions live with trusted CBOs who can help us deploy them more rapidly and reliably.