Celebrating Year 1 of the Community Adaptations to City Heat (CATCH) Project: Urban Heat Action and Policy Database, Policy Brief, and Cross-Jurisdictional Learning
October 22, 2026
In summer 2025, A Better City joined as a subcontractor on the three-year Community Adaptations to City Heat (CATCH) project, led by Dr. Patricia Fabián at the Boston University School of Public Health. The CATCH team is an interdisciplinary team, funded by the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust, to explore the intersection of extreme heat vulnerability and public health, and to find ways to connect equitable extreme heat research with policymaking. A Better City sits on the Policy Team of the CATCH project, which has been busy in Year 1 researching heat policies and interventions in Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix.
Urban Heat Action and Policy Database: 1,400 Policies Across 18 U.S. Cities
In spring 2026, the CATCH Policy Team launched an Urban Heat Action and Policy Database, which leverages a heat vulnerability framework informed by frontline populations’ heat exposure (how much time they spend exposed to high heat conditions), heat sensitivity (how certain bodies are more sensitive to heat stress than others), and heat adaptive capacity (to what extent frontline communities are able to access heat-relieving resources). The Policy Team analyzed heat-relevant policies across climate, housing, sustainability, energy affordability, green infrastructure, shade, and other sectors that may indirectly impact heat frontline populations, or those hit “worst and first” by extreme heat. Heat-relevant policies may not always be labeled as extreme heat interventions, but often contain heat-relieving co-benefits, like energy subsidy policies that help frontline populations to be able to afford to turn on the air conditioning, for example. Initially created to feature policies across Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix, as of October 2026, the CATCH Database was updated to include an additional 15 cities, totaling over 1,400 heat policies and actions across cities of different size, heat type (ex. humid vs. dry, prolonged year-round heat vs. seasonal), local governance structures, and cross-climate hazards. As of October 2026, the CATCH Policy Database features policies across Albuquerque, Austin, Boston, Burlington (Vermont), Chicago, Houston, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Miami and Miami Beach, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. In Years 2 and 3 of the project, the team will expand this Database to include international cities in the Global South.
Policy Brief: Heat Policy Analysis Across Boston, New Orleans, and Phoenix
In addition to the Database, the CATCH Policy Team also published a policy brief in September 2026 titled, A Tale of Three Hot Cities: Comparing Extreme Heat Policy and Health Outcomes Across Phoenix, New Orleans, and Boston. In this policy brief, CATCH found that all three cities are actively addressing extreme heat, while tailoring policies according to geography-specific needs like the cross-climate hazards of extreme cold (Boston), hurricanes and disaster recovery (New Orleans), and drought (Phoenix). Additionally, many existing heat policies are applied citywide, meaning that they do not name or prioritize specific frontline populations. Heat policies also tend to focus on short-term heat emergency response related to acute high heat events, more so than focusing on addressing systemic risks to critical infrastructure and long-term heat resilience. Finally, in each city, opportunities for public-private partnerships help to pilot equitable community solutions, and to augment existing city-led heat response efforts (please see photos from one of NOLA’s Community Lighthouses, or local community resilience hubs with solar plus storage, below).
Learning Across Jurisdictions
In Year 1 of the CATCH Project, the Policy Team has also been busy sharing the results of our policy research across cities at various venues, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in New Orleans, the National Energy Utilities and Affordability Coalition (NEUAC) in Seattle, and the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates meeting (virtual), in addition to meetings with several community-based organizations in different jurisdictions. In particular, the intersection of heat vulnerability and energy affordability continues to be a key theme across all cities analyzed, since one of the consistently most vulnerable frontline populations continues to be those who cannot afford air conditioning—it is not enough to distribute air conditioners if people cannot afford to use them. Especially as Massachusetts considers its energy affordability bill, with a possible section including emergency shutoff protections during periods of extreme heat, it is clear that both city and state lawmakers would benefit from integrating heat policymaking into related policies across energy, housing, buildings, sustainability, and green infrastructure, among other sectors.
For more information on the CATCH project, please visit the website here, and please reach out to Isabella Gambill with any questions.
