Green Space as a Heat Wave Adaptation Strategy: A Health Impact Assessment for San Diego County

Extreme heat poses a major public health threat, which will continue to worsen with climate change. It is therefore essential that local governments implement heat adaptation strategies – especially in large urban centers where this heat-health relationship is compounded by the micro-urban heat island effect. The use of green space to mitigate the health impacts of heat has shown promise in previous studies and serves as the basis of this project, which aimed to quantify the potential health benefits associated with 33 different greening scenarios in San Diego County, California. The project was divided into three steps, the first of which was understanding the current distribution of green space in San Diego County. This step involved collecting data for various green space proxies and mapping their county-wide distributions on the zip-code level. Step two aimed to understand the relationship between green space and health by performing meta-regressions between these proxies and zip-code level heat-attributable hospitalization data, which was obtained using a time-series approach. The last step involved developing a variety of hypothetical green space intervention scenarios based loosely on Benach et al.’s (2012) typology of policies, and then performing a health impact assessment to determine the health benefits of each intervention scenario. My results suggest that the use of green space could be effective as a heat adaptation strategy in San Diego County, with most greening scenarios producing a strong reduction in avoidable heat-attributable hospitalizations.