In the climate change era, managing heat effects is becoming an increasing issue – rising temperatures are affecting how businesses perform, how cities function, how infrastructure holds up and how people live, work and stay safe. Heat impacts are no longer theoretical, they’re driving increased mortality, productivity loss, energy blackouts and energy use spikes, pushing up operational costs for private companies. For many it’s a new and unfamiliar challenge, raising complex questions around causes, workable adaptations and retrofitting of existing buildings and structures.

At Arup, our heat experts bring together rigorous science, data and analytics, strategic thinking and real-world experience of implementing solutions in the built environment. We work for local and regional authorities responsible for the impacts of heat on towns and cities; developers shaping commercial and residential estates; and transport operators dealing with climate impacts on the major transit networks. Our ultimate goal is to deliver liveable, resilient, healthy environments and systems, where heat is a manageable issue and people can thrive.

How we can help

We support clients across the full breadth of the heat resilience lifecycle – starting with a deep understanding of the issue and its causes, through strategic planning to the implementation of practical solutions. Our approach has three stages: 

Assess

Heat mapping and thermal modelling

Assess

We analyse, measure and profile heat at different scales, from individual buildings through to neighbourhoods and whole cities.

This provides insights into temperatures, heat stress and overheating, enabling predictions of how heat will affect people, infrastructure and assets, from direct impacts through to operational and commercial consequences.

Explore how we’ve assessed how heat impacts buildings, infrastructure and communities in our Auckland Urban Heat Assessment.

Our in-house developed UHeat tool is able to bring new clarity to how heat impacts are evolving locally, enabling developers, planners and other stakeholders to plan for the future. UHeat combines satellite imagery with powerful analytics, revealing the local causes of urban heat islands. We use it to define the most low-emission, nature-based mitigations that will help a neighbourhood or estate to maintain an ideal, liveable and workable temperature.

Learn more about UHeat

Advise

Heat risk strategy

Advise

Heat is a complex issue and requires a coordinated, locally focused and insight-driven approach if measures are to really achieve improvement.

We work with clients like city authorities, estate owners and developers to take on this high-level strategic work, backed by scientific rigour, with public research and engagement to really understand what’s driving the issue – now and in future. This forms the basis of workable heat risk strategies that can shape local decision making, planning policy and mitigations.

Discover our heat action plan for the City of New Orleans

Learn about our work on the Fresno County Climate Resilience Plan for Transportation (California)

We’ve also helped London to profile the effects of heat on homes in a major study.

Act

Heat design and engineering

Act

We implement adaptation measures at different scales, from city-scale strategies through to building-scale retrofit.

Our approach balances operational measures, passive design responses, nature-based solutions and targeted active interventions where needed, with a focus on delivering effective, practical and low-energy outcomes.

Learn more about our framework of nature-based solutions for climate change in Madrid

Read our insight into an integrated vision for net zero building design in Asia

Explore our work with Roof Over Our Heads (ROOH) in Rasulabad

How heat shapes key sectors

  1. 1

    Property

    As a complex sector, property faces different versions of the climate change threat. In many countries the race is on to retrofit homes and offices designed for a radically different climate, to ensure that populations of all ages can cope with increasing temperatures and more extreme weather more broadly. We work as a strategic partner to local authorities and developers alike, to identify workable adaptations for single buildings or whole districts.

  2. 2

    Transport

    Public transport systems are the connective tissue of the modern economy – but they face large and scaling threats from rising temperatures, like buckling rails, deformed tarmac roads or runways, and the failure of key support equipment and technologies. Drawing on our deep understanding of highways, rail, and aviation infrastructure, we help clients to identify risks and plan mitigations that are cost effective and sustainable.

  3. 3

    Energy

    For operators and owners across the energy sector, rising temperatures present a generational challenge for infrastructure that every country depends on. Heat risks manifest in a complex range of ways, from direct impacts on exposed infrastructure to the increase in wildfires and damage to energy networks. We use a three-stage analysis approach to help energy players identify risks and plan a programmatic response.

  4. 4

    Data centres

    For the fast-growing data centre sector, heat has always been a central performance issue – but climate change heat increases present a major future operating constraint that must be planned for and mitigated. Additionally, data centres are being pushed further by the needs of artificial intelligence GPUs and the need for ever more effective cooling. Our data centre teams help clients to bring these engineering issues and insights together to develop a heat risk plan that can drive more efficient data centre designs or retrofitting measures.