Cooling locations -Netherlands

Micro

Main result 

Concrete support for older people

Title

Cooling locations

Date August 2021

Objectives

To provide for frail or elderly people, an area or space that is cooled when their

own house is being heated up during a heatwave. This is not a temporary home,

but it does provide some relief from the heat that would otherwise be inescapable.

Location  /geographical coverage           

The Hague, The Netherlands. Several locations throughout the city have been

identified as a possible cooling space during a heat wave. The project is a pilot.

Organisation  responsible  for good  practice     

Municipality of The Hague

Short  summary 

The project is a pilot to evaluate the effectiveness of providing cooling locations

throughout the city of The Hague for frail or elderly people to seek shelter from the heat when their own home is heated up during a heatwave and cannot maintain a comfortable indoor climate.

The plan will be activated when the national heat plan of The Netherlands is

activated. The criterium is as follows. If the weather models predict a 10 percent

chance or more of warm weather with more than four days with 27 degrees or

more. It is then possible for the meteorological institute and the scientific advisory organ for public health and environment to activate the heat plan based upon the weather forecasts.

There is currently no triage of people to be allowed into the cooling locations, it is organized on a first come, first serve basis.

Impact 

It is expected that this will be a success for the targeted beneficiaries. However, it

is a pilot and its effectiveness will have to be evaluated after practicing it during a hot summer. Due to the covid pandemic and no heat wave occurring since then the pilot hasn’t been put into use yet and has thus not yet been evaluated.

Innovation

The innovation in the management of heat waves is possibly the realization that

multiple partners are required to accomplish effective heat wave countermeasures. In this project multiple locations with different owners have to work together to provide shelter. This requires a certain level of communication between them to transport and distribute visitors. They also have to find a way to accommodate the visitors without them interfering too much in the daily operations of the location where they are. Sometimes, this is not possible which has other implications. Another issue is how to keep the ‘heat-refugees’ busy during the day and how to find people to support these activities. Whether or not to provide cool shelter during the night is another issue.

Lessons learned

At this point in time there have been no evaluations of the pilot that are available. Some preliminary unofficial evaluations indicate that most elderly people want to stay at home and don’t want to travel >300m. This complicates the feasibility of the project. The disruption of normal activity of the locations being used poses another issue which might require financial compensation for commercial businesses. Lastly, the temperature differences between outside and inside need not be too great to prevent rapid temperature differences that are also detrimental to those susceptible to heat waves. This occurs also with transportation to a heat sheltering location.

Sustainability    

All the cooling locations need to have some way to maintain their indoor climate.

Several ways to do this exist but mostly this comes down to using air conditioning equipment to cool the interior space. These air conditioning units require a lot of power, use ecologically unfriendly refrigerant gases and require a lot of installation materials. These units also have costs in purchase and maintenance and operating costs. The impact on the locations sheltering the people is that their regular business is (temporarily) disrupted. This has some cost in economic productivity. For churches and libraries, these costs will be fairly limited. The cooling locations in the current plan do not receive financial compensation for this loss of productivity.

 Replicability  and/or  up-scaling

This pilot project can relatively easily be adapted to other cities. It is a matter of

organization. Up-scaling possibilities: perhaps old bunkers that exist in The

Netherlands as a remnant from the second world war can be used as cooling

locations. These bunkers are still present here and there because they are relatively difficult to demolish and function as museum or heritage. They have a unique property that makes them suitable for heat shelter; their indoor climate is always constant and requires no equipment or power to maintain it. Their accessibility (for wheelchairs and such) is however not optimal. Their location is also far from optimal as most bunkers in the city have been demolished (but not all) and the one remaining are usually in a far-off place.

Contact  details

Nina Van Haren

nina.vanharen@denhaag.nl

+31625775381

Gemeente Den Haag (municipality of The Hague)

Postbus 12600

2500 DJ Den Haag

Related Web site(s)

https://vng.nl/praktijkvoorbeelden/haags-hitteplan

Related  resources  that have been  developed

https://klimaatadaptatienederland.nl/actueel/actueel/nieuws/2020/hitte-eenzaamheidskaart/

https://rce.webgispublisher.nl/Viewer.aspx?map=militaire%5Flandschapskaart#