Cooling Sydney Strategy: Planning for Sydney 2050

Abstract

In 2007, the City of Sydney developed a long-term strategic vision and plan for the future, Sustainable Sydney 2030. Building on the success of this plan, the City of Sydney are looking beyond the minimum 10-year lifespan to develop a vision for ‘Sydney 2050’ that is community led and informed by reliable research and technical advice. Planning for Sydney 2050 will look to the recently developed Resilient Sydney report which provides the first strategic direction for the city to increase its “ability to survive, adapt and thrive in the face of increasing global uncertainty and local shocks and stresses”. A key direction of this report and of the planning for Sydney 2050 is to ‘live with our climate’. Within this, extreme heat is identified as the one of the primary challenges for Greater Sydney and addressing it requires collaborative action and policy to minimise the associated health risks and resource demands. Therefore, the purpose of this report is to provide urban overheating mitigation recommendations to support the strategic planning of Sydney 2050 based on in-depth research conducted by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living (CRCLCL) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW).