A pressing need exists to understand how, when, and why to adjust and build upon urban environmental policies that can influence a city’s capacity to foster and enact climate adaptation and mitigation. The objective of this book has been to define what we can learn from past urban environmental crises and resulting policy transitions that might be applicable to understand how climate change will manifest as crises in cities and what can be done to help accelerate urban climate action. In this chapter, we more directly turn our attention to learning what the book’s case studies reveal about these objectives. The case studies illustrate how existing urban environmental practices can be adjusted and enhanced to better grapple with the challenges of climate change. The analysis provides the groundwork for a set of innovative recommendations on how to perceive the urban climate crisis and how to consider new urban climate change policies. A key overall conclusion is that we should do all we can to learn from previous urban environmental crises as they will continue to inform us moving into the future.

Globally, more and more cities are affected by the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI). This phenomenon describes urban areas’ increased air and surface temperatures as compared to surrounding suburban or rural areas. The UHI was first observed and analyzed in the early nineteenth century, but only in recent decades has it attracted greater attention from policymakers due to the UHI’s increasing magnitude and widely recognized environmental and health consequences. Increasing awareness among residents about the UHI has further amplified the pressure on city governments to implement mitigation strategies. This chapter explores the strategies and policy ideas emerging in cities around the world aimed at mitigating the UHI. Two major forms of interventions are distinguishable. First, there are measures that specifically and directly target the UHI. Second, there are broader climate change adaptation strategies that involve using tools that indirectly address the UHI problem. Each policy initiative described in this chapter is analyzed with a focus on regulatory strategy – specifically, what are the successful regulatory measures UHI mitigation policy strategies employ? More particularly, what is the correct balance between classical regulation, which relies on imposing obligations and sanctions, and more innovative, flexible, and less directive tools that often encourage autonomous and voluntary citizen engagement in implementing public policy objectives? This chapter will show that what some may consider unorthodox UHI mitigation policies can serve as inspirations for other public intervention strategies targeting climate change.