In the country’s fastest-warming city, extreme-heat planning is just beginning

RENO — Across the Desert Southwest, leaders have been woefully unprepared for heat waves that are supercharged by climate change, leading to the deaths of thousands and widespread heat illness.

In Reno, ranked the country’s fastest-warming city six years in a row, officials acknowledge their response is in the early stages.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us, and we don’t have all the answers,” said Brian Beffort, Washoe County’s sustainability manager. “I’m focused on trees because they check the most number of boxes: They clean the air. They prevent stormwater. They cool things off. … There’s a lot of planning that we need to do. But that’s not the only intervention that we need, right?”

Beffort was one of about 30 who attended the Nevada State Climate Office’s first-ever Northern Nevada Heat Summit at the University of Nevada, Reno, meant to bring local leaders together to discuss what’s been done so far on extreme heat and what lies ahead.

Down south in Las Vegas, extreme heat response has been largely limited to Clark County activating so-called cooling centers, strategically placed buildings where anyone can go to cool off during specific hours. They are generally only open when the National Weather Service issues an extreme heat warning.

But Northern Nevada’s urban cities are a few steps behind, with fewer cooling centers that are open less frequently, unclear reporting of heat-related deaths and a lack of tree planting or tree maintenance on private property.

Data collection efforts

Much of the action taken so far is the gathering of data to help assess the problem.

The Reno-Sparks Heat Mapping project, conducted on a hot day in August, employed citizen scientists to measure where the community’s so-called urban heat islands are, or the areas where heat is felt more intensely because of excess pavement.

It found that some of the region can experience temperatures that are 20 degrees hotter than areas that have more trees and green spaces. That’s almost twice the difference of a similar effort conducted in Las Vegas, where there was an 11-degree difference.

“There are huge variations in how much each of us is exposed to heat, and how vulnerable we may be,” said Tom Albright, a UNR professor who serves as the deputy state climatologist and led the mapping campaign. “It varies a lot in space and socioeconomic factors like income, race and ethnicity.”

However, other sources of data — and funding — have been harder to rely on.

Before it was wiped from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website at the beginning of the Trump administration, Beffort said, his Washoe County staff was lucky it downloaded data from the “EJScreen” environmental justice tool to create a “tree equity index” map. That map will show where trees are most urgently needed, he said.

Beffort said the county lost a $275,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, meant to hire an urban forester who could direct future tree planting efforts, as part of Trump’s goal to cut spending across the federal government.

However, all of the data visualizations that have been generated, including the urban heat island map, are useful to justify extreme-heat policy to decision-makers, he said.

“Thanks to the work by all of our volunteers who did this study last year and this data that we now have, we have a starting place,” Beffort said.

Nevada Heat Lab is a statewide hub

Ariel Choinard, of the Desert Research Institute, has recently changed the name of the Southern Nevada Heat Resilience Lab to help communicate the need for statewide response to the issue.

Now called the Nevada Heat Lab, the group of scientists is based in Las Vegas but will take a broader approach to expand research and outreach to Northern Nevada, as well.

Following major heat waves, Choinard and her staff bring together almost 100 representatives from Southern Nevada government and the nonprofit sector to discuss how extreme heat response can be improved.

And it has, to some degree: Choinard’s team worked with Clark County to ensure that water bottles are available at every cooling station and that each station is clearly marked with a sign. The lab will collect data for a study this summer about how much Southern Nevada’s cooling centers are used, and has recommended they be open 24 hours because of high nighttime temperatures.

“What we don’t do is emergency response, and we’re kind of occupying a really difficult space right now because there’s no one else to do it,” Choinard said. “I’m hopeful we won’t have to be quasi-emergency managers for much longer, and that somebody else will pick up that piece of the work.”

Quantifying extreme heat’s impact

One area where Washoe County may lag behind Clark County is proper accounting of the heat-related death toll.

Compared with 527 heat-related deaths in Southern Nevada just last year, the Washoe County medical examiner has recorded only 11 since 2020, a health department spokesperson confirmed.

Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse has told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in prior interviews that her office has only recently updated its protocol for determining when heat may have played a factor in someone’s death, modeling it after Maricopa County in Arizona.

Throughout the country — and possibly still in Las Vegas — experts say heat-related deaths are widely undercounted. Still, Choinard said death tolls can be a lagging indicator of the extreme heat problem, particularly because they can rise many months after a year is over, as the coroner closes out cases.

What’s important to consider when discussing good heat policy, she said, is how it intersects with other issues like affordable housing, energy costs and the urban heat island effect.

“We know that people make really tough trade-offs when it gets hot,” Choinard said. “People do choose between cooling their home to a safe and livable temperature or putting food on the table.”

Focus on solutions

The summit’s date coincided with the signing of Assembly Bill 96, the Nevada law that requires all city and county governments with more than 100,000 residents to create a heat mitigation plan by July 2026.

Attendees praised that law as a necessary step forward.

“Now, we’re going to be thinking about this in more detail,” said Beffort, of Washoe County.

Looking forward, Northern Nevada’s sustainability leaders said it’s critical for outside voices to join the conversation at public meetings. If people want extreme heat response, inspiring elected officials to take the issue seriously through direct engagement is paramount, Beffort said.

“We do what we’re told in the order that we’re told, and heat’s not on the list right now,” Beffort said. “We have a few things we can do, but it’s not going to move the needle until we as a community talk about it more. People should advocate for it more, so our leaders realize that it needs to happen and will pass those policies.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.