Evidence Synthesis for Shade Design and Decision Making in Urban Built Environments

Shade provides thermal comfort, reduces urban heat islands, prevents heat-related illness and death, and, when provided by tree canopy, extends co-benefits to the environment. Despite its importance, many outdoor public spaces lack adequate or even any shade, and it is inequitably distributed. The scarcity of shade is exacerbated by the design and implementation challenges of its provision. In the context of climate change, urban shade scarcity is a design emergency that requires comprehensive and usable evidence to create solutions.
This presentation will highlight an interdisciplinary collaboration (public health, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban forestry) that will support evidence-based design practice, climate adaptation, and human health and well-being. Our research includes a series of extensive scoping reviews of the literature on shade provision, design, policy, benefits and co-benefits, barriers and facilitators, and equity. With methods informed by Arksey and O’Malley and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines for scoping reviews, six databases have been searched, 19,237 articles have been screened at the title and abstract level with the help of DistillerSR AI, and 2,371 articles are currently being screened at the full-text level. Data extraction and thematic synthesis will take place in February-March.
The results of these scoping reviews and evidence syntheses on shade will lay the necessary groundwork for providing robust and synthesized evidence readily packaged for application by public health and built environment professionals to improve our cities’ shadescapes. Knowledge mobilization will include a Shade Design Framework for practitioners based on the scientific evidence syntheses and a national shade design competition where interdisciplinary teams will use the Shade Design Framework and the synthesized evidence to inform their design submissions demonstrating the utility of and generating interest in, the Framework and the body of evidence informing its development.
This research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.