This lecture report was first published by the Centre for Liveable Cities.

As cities around the world confront intensifying climate threats, it has become more important than ever to design urban environments that protect both people and planet. From extreme heat to worsening air quality and sudden weather events, we know that these risks do not affect everyone equally, and often hit vulnerable communities the hardest.

As such, the webinar focused on how cities can take a proactive, health-sensitive approach to climate resilience by exploring how nature-based solutions, resilient infrastructure, and thoughtful urban design can not only mitigate climate risks, but also improve the overall wellbeing and liveability of our communities.

Each speaker (listed below) first delivered their presentation, and the presentations were followed by a moderated discussion with the audience.

Opening Remarks:

Ms Diana Torres, Regional Governance Advisor, UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub

Moderator:

Mr Stewart Tan, Deputy Director, Centre for Liveable Cities

Speakers:

1. Dr Tan Shin Bin, Assistant Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
2. Mr Yugesh Pradhanang, International Programme Manager, UNDP Bangladesh
3. Ms Cristina Kuo Lin, Divisional Director, Atelier Ten, a Surbana Jurong company

Conceptual foundations of the link between environment, health, and equity

Shin Bin opened the session by introducing the ecological model of health, which illustrates how various environmental scales, from neighbourhood settings to global ecosystems, interact to shape human health. This model calls on planners and policymakers to examine not just individual-level risk factors, but the systemic and institutional forces that shape health outcomes.

Shin Bin stressed that health inequities are not unfortunate accidents but preventable outcomes. Despite broad economic growth in many countries, health gaps are widening. Life expectancy can differ by decades depending on one’s geography or social identity, including income, race, or education. Without explicit equity-focused interventions, urban development risks entrenching these divides, even under the guise of progress.

An example she raised was heat stress: lower-income and minority communities tend to live in hotter parts of the city, with reduced access to cooling infrastructure (e.g., green spaces or air conditioning) and lower adaptive capacity (e.g., mobility, healthcare access, and social support). This spatial and social vulnerability exemplifies how environmental and health injustice compound each other.

Four Key Action Areas for Urban Planners

To address these interconnected challenges, Shin Bin suggested four priority actions for planners:

1. Advance context-sensitive research: Health-environment relationships are complex and require research that combines spatial, qualitative, and quantitative approaches grounded in local context.
2. Build Cross-Sectoral Partnerships: Urban planning must break out of its disciplinary silo and work alongside public health, housing, and social services agencies.
3. Co-Design Across Disciplines: Interventions should be collaboratively developed, leveraging input from affected communities and expertise across fields.
4. Embed Participatory Processes: Incorporating community decision-making from the start enhances the legitimacy, sustainability, and impact of planning decisions.

Locally Led Resilience: Lessons from Bangladesh

Building on this conceptual foundation, the discussion then expanded to consider how climate resilience can be built from the ground up.

Yugesh highlighted the UNDP’s experience in Bangladesh, where rapid urbanisation and climate-induced migration are pushing millions into vulnerable informal settlements. Projections suggest 13 million people will move from rural climate risk zones to cities by 2050. These communities face compounding threats, such as inadequate housing, limited services, and disproportionate exposure to flooding, heatwaves, and disease. Many local governments are also under-resourced, making community-driven approaches essential.

UNDP’s Approach: Inclusive Governance and Green Infrastructure

UNDP’s National Urban Poverty Reduction Programme operates across over 1,300 cities and towns, reaching more than 4 million people. It adopts a participatory, step-by-step model for locally led climate adaptation. Key interventions include permeable pavements and improved drainage to reduce flood risk, solar-powered lighting for safer, low-carbon public spaces, tree planting, raised toilets, and emergency evacuation routes, and decentralised water treatment and arsenic removal systems.

These solutions are tailored to local needs and managed by the community. Impact has been measurable: 1.9 million people benefited from improved environments, with 98% of households reporting better living conditions in UNDP areas, compared to 40% elsewhere.

Affordable, Climate-Resilient Housing Prototypes

Housing remains a key challenge. Through community financing mechanisms, UNDP supports residents in rebuilding climate-adaptive homes. These homes integrate passive cooling and reflective materials, storm and flood-resilient designs, and solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and efficient cookstoves.

In one innovation, ferrocement technology¹ enabled the construction of durable homes in just 32 days. Based on pilot success, the government is now co-developing low-cost social housing in five cities, incorporating green design, hollow bricks, elevated floors, and shared public spaces.

Bangladesh’s experience shows that embedding both “hardware” (physical infrastructure) and “software” (governance, community leadership) strengthens cities.

Urban Heat Islands and the Role of Urban Design

Building on this ground up example, the discussion turned to how these health and equity concerns are revealed in the physical fabric of cities, particularly through the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.

Cristina first clarified the difference between climate change and the UHI effect. While climate change refers to global temperature rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the UHI effect is a localised phenomenon caused by the materials and form of urban environments. Dense, impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt trap heat, leading to temperature differences of up to 4°C between city centres and greener surrounding areas. Though UHI does not contribute to global warming, it is exacerbated by it, intensifying discomfort, health risks, and energy use in cities.

How Urban Form and Materials Trap Heat

Cristina explained that urban heat is experienced across three key layers: the surface layer, where different materials absorb and store heat; the canopy layer, where pedestrians directly experience thermal discomfort; the boundary layer, which holds residual atmospheric heat.

She demonstrated using thermal images from Singapore: on the same day, grassy areas measured around 39°C while adjacent asphalt peaked above 60°C. Material selection, therefore, plays a critical role. Urban forms with dense clusters and minimal sky exposure restrict airflow, worsening thermal stress. In contrast, vegetated, porous, and well-ventilated layouts cool faster and retain comfort longer.

Multi-Scale Mitigation Strategies

Cristina emphasised the need for coordinated interventions across multiple scales:

1. Micro scale: Design choices like facade shading, window orientation, and roof treatments.
2. Neighbourhood scale: Street geometry and block layout to maximise ventilation.
3. Urban scale: Spatial porosity, tower spacing, and integrated green-blue infrastructure.

In her design work, Cristina’s team uses solar radiation modelling and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate heat exposure and airflow in early planning stages, informing decisions on building massing, layout, and shading strategies.

Case Study: Clarke Quay

She showcased the redesign of Clarke Quay, a popular nightlife area that suffered from daytime heat. Thermal scans showed surfaces under the ETFE canopy reached over 40°C. The design team responded with 3 strategies:

1. Material change: Replacing the ETFE canopy with fritted panels to selectively block solar radiation.
2. Ventilation upgrades: Swapping conventional fans with 360-degree misting fans to enhance evaporative cooling.
3. Targeted shading: Prioritising shading over costly resurfacing.

These low-cost, high-impact interventions reduced ambient temperature by 2°C and restored the daytime usability of the precinct. Cristina concluded with a strong message: liveability begins with comfort, and comfort begins with design.

Moderated Discussion Segment

Building on the presentations, the moderated discussion segment examined shared challenges and emerging strategies to build environments that not only withstand climate pressures but actively support public health and social well-being.

In particular, the moderated discussion surfaced several key insights at the intersection of climate resilience, urban health, and long-term planning. Nature-based solutions were discussed as both aspirational and constrained. While panellists agreed that green infrastructure, like linked corridors between parks and water bodies, offers co-benefits for health, biodiversity, and resilience, they also cautioned against framing such interventions as cost-free. Land availability, maintenance needs, and competing development priorities present real barriers. Coordination challenges between government agencies, and low public awareness of long-term climate impacts, could further complicate implementation.

Healthy ageing was then identified as an under-addressed but critical component of climate adaptation. Shin Bin urged more context-specific planning to account for ageing populations, highlighting how living arrangements and health status shape vulnerability to heat and extreme weather. This requires systematic, data-driven assessments of how seniors interact with the built environment. Cristina added that current architectural evaluation tends to overemphasise operational efficiency (e.g., energy, water use) at the expense of more holistic health metrics, such as thermal stress, noise, and air quality. She and Shin Bin both advocated for urban design and planning practices to better integrate environmental and health data, enabling cities to identify and respond to localised vulnerabilities.

Cooling strategies that reduce reliance on air-conditioning were another key topic. Cristina pointed to new trends in Singapore, such as naturally ventilated malls and semi-open public spaces, as examples of targeted, low-energy cooling. In Bangladesh, Yugesh shared how simple, cost-effective designs like hollow brick housing can significantly reduce indoor temperatures for vulnerable households. Across contexts, the message was clear: passive design and adaptive urban form can make a measurable difference in heat resilience.

The speakers also emphasised the importance of tools, metrics, and long-term planning. Shin Bin cited Health Impact Assessments and equity screening tools as promising mechanisms, though their effectiveness is highly context-dependent. In Singapore, access to granular environmental and health data enhances their utility. Cristina suggested that climate simulation tools, especially those incorporating future climate projections, should be mainstreamed into the early stages of design and masterplanning. Yugesh highlighted Bangladesh’s use of a multidimensional poverty index and climate vulnerability maps to guide budgeting and implementation at the national and city levels.

Finally, the conversation turned to the importance of public-private collaboration and governance. Yugesh shared examples of peer learning among city governments and public-private partnerships on waste management and circular economy with actors like Unilever. Cristina reflected on Singapore’s experience with 50-year planning horizons, noting that such foresight helps align public goals with private sector incentives. She pointed to market sensing and clear performance targets as effective tools for engagement.

Despite broad agreement on the solutions, speakers acknowledged persistent barriers to implementation. These include siloed responsibilities, unclear accountability for cross-cutting issues like the urban heat island effect, budget cuts that dilute original design intent, and trade-offs between green space and development. Ultimately, while many interventions are technically sound and intuitively beneficial, delivering them at scale requires systemic changes to how cities govern, coordinate, and prioritise health and climate resilience.

¹ Ferrocement is a construction method that uses layers of wire mesh coated with a cement-sand mixture to create thin, strong, and lightweight structures.

This is the second in a series of webinars co-organised by CLC and UNDP. Check out the recap of the first webinar, "A Cross-Domain Approach to Sustainable Urban Mobility" here.