DENVER — The City of Denver’s climate action office is working to help people most vulnerable to the heat and extreme weather.
“We need to both to address climate change, from reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, but also getting ready to help the city exist in a in a time when it's going to be hotter and drier,” Deputy Executive Director for the Denver Climate Action Sustainability and Resiliency office Jonathan Wachtel said. "We're already feeling it. And so, part of the work that we do is really focusing on how we adapt across our landscapes.”
Wachtel said that work includes building out the tree canopy in Denver because it can help cool neighborhoods down. This has been an ongoing project in Denver.
The city has opened up grants for non-profits and community groups to help install air purifiers and air conditioners for some of the people most vulnerable to the heat, according to Wachtel.
“We have programs, you know, to deploy up to $50,000 grants right now to community organizations that can then help install air conditioning and indoor air purifiers in our most vulnerable neighborhoods to support people's ability to adapt to this type of heat,” Wachtel said. “This is a real shift in how hot it is here in Denver. A lot of our homes were built in a time when air conditioning really wasn't needed. It got cool enough at night, we had very few days that got hotter than 90 degrees. In the last few years, we've been seeing upwards of 60 or 70 days above 90 degrees, when historically it was less than 30.”
Wachtel said the grants are open now. The city wanted to go through non-profits and community groups because they are the most plugged into who will need these resources the most.
