Global Cool Cities Alliance (GCCA) launched in 2010 to accelerate a world-wide transition to cooler, healthier cities. Its mission is to advance heat mitigation policies and programs that promote efficient and comfortable buildings, healthy and resilient cities, and mitigate the warming effects of climate change. GCCA supports strategies that increase the solar reflectance of urban surfaces such as roofs, walls, and roads as a cost-effective way to achieve significant cooling results.

Our Approach

The GCCA approach is to cultivate partnerships with cities and other stakeholders to give them the tools and support they need to identify successful policies and programs, adapt them for each city’s unique characteristics, and connect with experts and partners to help with implementation. We work with companies and governments to help grow new markets for technologies and materials. We also link the diverse world of experts and researchers who study urban heat islands and cool materials. We break this strategy down into five basic activities:

• Cultivate Partners — Partner with cities, regions, national governments, networks, and companies across the globe to pursue cool roofs and pavements programs. Support these efforts by making it easy to replicate best practices, find expert partners, and share experiences with peers.
• Build Tools for Implementers — Grow GCCA’s Cool Roofs and Pavements Toolkit to ensure research about urban heat islands is widely disseminated. The Toolkit is a collaborative network that shares best practices, case studies, and research.
• Promote Building Codes and Specifications — Incorporate cool surfaces into the building, energy, and green codes of key US states and major foreign countries. Learn more out our work here.
• Advance Research — Support new research to further understand the impacts of cool surfaces on energy use, response to global climate change, urban resiliency, health, and other topic areas. Read some of our recent reports here and here.
• Spur Market Development — Promote supportive market conditions to spur the installation of cool surfaces in the US and other countries, by supporting testing and rating infrastructure, facilitating relationships, training, material availability and more. Read about our work with the C40 Cities of Climate Leadership here.

A key component of GCCA’s delivery strategy is to multiply our efforts by building partnerships.

DOWNLOADS

Download our 2-page overview
Download our fact sheet on cool roofs and pavements