The Global Cool Cities Alliance keeps a comprehensive list of media covering cool roofs, cool pavements, and a wide range of urban heat island-related issues. Periodically, we will highlight trending topics in a feature we call Cool Retrospective. For our inaugural issue, we look back at 2013.

2013 saw a number of cities make huge strides in mitigating the impacts of excess urban heat by adopting new cool surface policies. New studies identified the economic advantages of cool roofing and highlighted other critical benefits of reducing urban heat islands to health and to addressing environmental and social justice issues. Overall, awareness of the cool roofing opportunity continues to grow.

Read the Retrospective on our Cool Roofs and Cool Pavements Toolkit knowledge base here.