Cool Spots LA App built on responsible data foundations

Grand Park splash pad, downtown Los Angeles; image from grandparkla.org

🌱 A periodic feature on Tech and Climate
Kelly Poole, our climate lead based in San Francisco, shares highlights and observations from a recent chat with Marta Segura, City of Los Angeles Chief Heat Officer, and Eva Pereira, the City’s Chief Data Officer, about the launch of the new Cool Spots LA App.

As expected, summer is sizzling everywhere, and staying cool has become increasingly difficult. On days with severe heat, for example, Los Angeles County emergency departments see an extra 1,510 patients. As heat waves become more frequent, those most vulnerable to heat, such as children, the elderly, the houseless, and pregnant people, need resources to stay cool and out of the hospital.

Marta Segura was brought on board as the City of Los Angeles’ first Chief Heat Officer in 2022. Marta, who also serves as the City’s Director of Climate Emergency Mobilization, is helping Angelenos adapt to severe heat. For context, Chief Heat Officers are a new addition to government climate teams. There are currently seven people holding the position globally, all of whom are women.

To improve citizen heat resilience, Marta initiated the Cool Spots LA App, a web-based platform that provides locations of cooling resources in the city of LA. The project features various types of cooling resources, anything that can cool you down on a hot day…be it a shaded park, library, splash pad, or even a drinking fountain.

Screenshot of the Cool Spots LA App

Through an exemplary application of data science, the platform not only democratizes access to cooling resources, but also allows city officials to identify communities that lack cooling infrastructure and respond to their needs. To create the platform, Marta collaborated with Eva Pereira, the City’s Chief Data Officer, who was instrumental in amalgamating cooling center data from sources across LA County.

Though the Cool Spots LA App has been in development for over a year, this summer is considered its hard launch, with city officials hoping to see a decrease in the number of heat-related hospitalizations. I recently spoke with both Marta and Eva to learn more about their work together and what their hopes are for the Cool Spots project.

Highlights from our conversation

Kelly: Why is data a critical tool in addressing climate change?

Eva: I think data is a valuable tool because it helps you uncover underlying social vulnerabilities which can help target resources more effectively.

Marta: What we're all discovering is that the racial wealth gap and history of redlining across the nation is so closely correlated to where the greatest heat impacts are and it's important to make that connection because then the solution is much more comprehensive and holistic, and cities can align their resources to work on the long-term historical disinvestment while also addressing climate change.

Kelly: Who did you collaborate with for this project?

Marta: It’s critical to have many players in the ecosystem connected on these initiatives to make it efficient and successful… It was really critical to have somebody like Eva at the city who could bring the data together and present it in a way that was very user friendly…It's a browser based data platform which you know is actually really appropriate because we have heard from our low income communities who are not as data savvy that anything more complicated would have been less accessible.

It was a process of gathering information that already existed but in very different websites and accounts across the city. LA County shares similar data that [includes] both county and city cooling centers, but this is a different approach. We're not just showing cooling centers, we're showing other cooling spots and cooling amenities. One of the reasons we wanted to integrate it collaboratively is because we realized it needed to be a lot more visible than it has been.

Eva and her team have relationships with many universities… so they have been pioneering this work of collaboration with other academic data scientists. Some of the fathers of this data inquiry are Doctor Manuel Pastor from USC and Professor Bob Bullard. Bob Bullard is known as the father of environmental justice…and Manuel Pastor is the reason we have CalEnviroScreen [an environmental justice mapping tool that identifies areas in California most affected by multiple forms of pollution].

These particular professors, who are Latino and African American, use data to convey stories about climate change and environmental injustice, and I think it's because of catalysts like them that we’re now really making those dots connect.

Kelly: What did the rollout of this resource look like? How did you encourage uptake?

Marta: We surveyed 546 people in our heat survey and 334 of them were frontline community members. 43% of the respondents would like to see more resilient centers and cooling centers in their communities, but they also feel they lack awareness and information on where to find them. That means the other ~60% didn't even know yet about it, so there's still a huge gap of information. 

Over 70 organizations, both businesses and nonprofits, have signed up to share our social media. This is the first year that we're really testing the [#HeatRelief4LA] campaign approach and working with the Los Angeles Regional Climate Collaborative, the Leap LA Coalition, the Repower Coalition, and many others so that they can spread the word about cooling centers. We're also training the 311 department so they know how to direct people not just to the app but to the actual locations and resources. We’re also training with public libraries because 73 of our libraries serve as cooling centers and we want every librarian to know and embrace their identity as a cooling center.

Kelly: Can you speak to any surprises or challenges from the rollout of the project?

Eva: Pulling together all the data was a process… and I was at first thinking of cooling centers in a very narrow way, but it turns out that there are so many city facilities that can be used as cooling centers beyond what you typically think of…Beyond that, once we started working with UCLA and received their heat vulnerability data it was really interesting to see how underlying social vulnerability impacts negative outcomes like excess ER visits and excess deaths… One would see zip codes adjacent to one another experiencing wildly different outcomes because of that underlying social vulnerability, so that just goes to show how important it is to use data to triage these resources in an effective way to help save lives.

Kelly: Going forward, what message are you hoping this project will send to the city?

Marta: Let's be very clear about the climate investments that the city is going to be providing so that the community can be a part of it and be engaged in the allocation and distribution of those investments… Also, let's listen closely to the kinds of resources communities need so that they can adapt to and provide their own mitigations to climate change and extreme heat.

For example, air conditioners are great for those that have the resources to pay for the electric bill, but it's an energy burden on those who can't afford [it], so we need alternatives to being told to turn on the AC…it's about life and death, and that's the kind of reframing that I hope our city can embrace… to be all allied good neighbors, to support our city, and adjust in an equitable way.

Screenshot of the UCLA Heat Maps site

Kelly: Are there any other aspects of this project you'd like to speak to?

Marta: We know that there's more remote sensing and AI data being tested…some of it's very good, but this whole concept of democratizing data and ground truthing solutions goes hand in hand, and I would love for those ground truth solutions to not just be by academics or cities but also by communities and nonprofit organizations… so, I see many more nonprofit organizations getting into this data science space and then democratizing that information and sharing it with other members of the community.

We've had too many experiences in the past with technologies that are more like experiments and have unintended consequences, and I think we have so little time and such a limited budget that I don't want to waste people's time or resources anymore… It's going to be a big summer for this program and that's really exciting to look forward to.

Setting a precedent

Marta and Eva demonstrated real passion for this project, as well as an acknowledgment that they are amidst a learning process. This project has exposed a shortage of cooling resources in underserved communities and it will take significant community outreach and data analysis to determine the most effective types of cooling resources and locations. Despite the project’s learning curve, relieving citizens from extreme heat is a time sensitive issue and it was important to launch the app as soon as possible. LA County expects to see ten times as many heat waves within the next 30 years and we will need a myriad of solutions to create heat resilient communities.

In terms of the app’s rollout this summer, I’m curious about potential logistical challenges, particularly for those who need the cooling centers the most. For example, will the unhoused be able to bring their belongings into cooling centers? What if severe heat falls on a Sunday when all city libraries are closed? And perhaps more challenging, what resources will be provided for house-bound individuals who cannot travel to cooling spots? (Fortunately, this past May, LA City Council voted to move forward with a plan to have mandatory air conditioning in all rental units in the city).

And going forward, perhaps details from past hospitalizations could inform the locations and types of new cooling spots. For example, what were people doing when they experienced a heat-related health emergency? Were they at home, at work, or on the streets? This data could also reveal a need for initiatives beyond the app such as demographic-focused educational campaigns and policy interventions.

The Cool Spots LA App sets an important precedent for climate adaptation efforts. It demonstrates that without the identification of a city’s most vulnerable and under-resourced communities, cities risk implementing changes that only perpetuate existing inequalities. Now that Marta and her team have a comprehensive understanding of where cooling resources do and don’t exist, the city can proceed to allocate resources in an intentional and informed manner. Lastly, Marta and Eva exemplified the importance of leveraging the knowledge and resources of your ecosystem. The work of different universities, organizations, and thought leaders was integrated into one comprehensive, current, and trailblazing resource that will not only save lives but also play a critical role in creating a more equitable and resilient Los Angeles. Hopefully next summer we’ll see evidence of its impact.

About the author

Kelly Poole

Kelly is a climate activist with a passion for innovative and equitable solutions. At As You Sow, she represents stock investors on corporate climate risk, advocating for the transition to a net zero economy. At LA Tech4Good, she highlights real world examples of climate tech through articles and events, hoping to inspire collaboration between the climate activism and data worlds. She is based in San Francisco, CA.