How urban planning can help Karachi tackle a growing heat crisis
By Usmaan Farooqui
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Last Friday, the mercury climbed to nearly 40 degrees Celsius in Karachi. The Pakistan Meteorological Department had issued an earlier in the week warning temperatures would rise after March 30, 2021. It’s hard to take a warning like that without a sense of impending dread. After all, it was only six years ago when a near claimed over 1,200 lives in the city.
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Karachi is what experts call an urban heat island, a city that is warmer than its surrounding suburban and rural areas. This has nothing to do with its geographical nature; Karachi is not hot because of its location. Instead, it is the city’s built environment that attracts and traps heat. According to , there are several factors that create a heat island including a lack of vegetation, population size, and development patterns.
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These actions can begin to transition Karachi onto the path of long-term heatwave mitigation. But they cannot substitute for a partial understanding of the problem. Here, the immediate challenge lies in first identifying the multifaceted causes of Karachi’s urban heat, many of which are deeply entrenched in the city’s haphazard development patterns. As always, there are no easy-bake solutions in the City of Lights (no pun intended). It’s well past time we realised that.
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