Help Prepare BC for Its Hotter Future
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British Columbia summers are forecast to become increasingly hotter, with extreme heat events occurring more frequently. The June 2021 heat dome resulted in increased heat-related hospital visits and 619 deaths, 98% of which occurred indoors. This event represented BC’s largest single weather-related loss of life. The question is: what actions are we taking today to better prepare ourselves for this climate-change-driven future?
An internationally studied and widely used heat-mitigation strategy that is not being meaningfully employed in BC is “cool roofing.” Most BC buildings currently have dark-coloured roofs, causing them to absorb considerably more of the sun’s energy than lighter-coloured ones, with white being the most effective at reflecting solar energy. To greater or lesser degrees, cool roofing materials are designed to reduce the amount of solar heat absorbed by roofs and transferred into buildings. Research confirms that the result can be cooler buildings both during the day and overnight, as less accumulated heat needs to be dissipated. Importantly, cool roofing is a passive technology that does not require energy to provide its benefits.
CoolRoofsBC is an independent, non-profit organization working to increase awareness, understanding and appropriate adoption of cool roofing throughout British Columbia.
Our work is focused not simply on raising awareness, but on helping move cool roofing toward practical consideration and greater use across the Province.
Your contribution will help CoolRoofsBC advance work that includes:
- Providing reliable, accessible information about cool roofing and its benefits;
- Expanding CoolRoofsBC’s Ambassador Program to support locally led awareness and action in communities across BC;
- Engaging municipalities, the Provincial Government and other public-sector organizations about opportunities to demonstrate leadership through their own buildings;
- Investigating emerging rooftop mapping technologies that could help BC communities better understand their cool-roofing and rooftop solar opportunities; and
- Supporting research, education and outreach needed to make cool roofing a more widely understood part of BC’s response to increasing summer heat and extreme heat events.
Much of this work has been developed through volunteer effort. To move from building awareness to undertaking these initiatives on a broader scale, CoolRoofsBC requires financial support. Every contribution, large or small, will help continue this work and bring greater attention to an opportunity that is quite literally all around us.
Help us prepare BC for its hotter future — one roof, one building and one community at a time.
For more information about CoolRoofsBC and our work, please visit www.coolroofsbc.org.