Third-annual Southern Arizona Heat Summit highlights youth voices while helping Tucson prepare for extreme heat
The third iteration of the annual event highlighted youth and other under-represented voices.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero offered opening remarks and moderated the youth panel at the 2026 Southern Arizona Heat Summit.
Avery Cline, Udall Center Student Marketing Assistant
More than 300 community leaders, organizers, researchers and engaged residents gathered on campus this month for a day of planning and action to mitigate and manage the negative impacts of extreme heat on a regional scale.
The University of Arizona held the third annual Southern Arizona Heat Planning Summit on Feb. 7 at Environment and Natural Resources 2 building, or ENR2.
The summit – planned in partnership by the city of Tucson, Pima County, and the university – has helped officials across Southern Arizona prepare for and protect vulnerable citizens during increasing extreme heat events and has led to an international reputation for excellence in heat planning and preparedness for the city of Tucson and U of A.
"One of the most powerful outcomes of this convening is that it doesn't end when the room clears," said Tucson Mayor Regina Romero during her opening remarks. "Because of the work that has come out of this summit, Tucson developed an award-winning heat action roadmap, adopted a heat worker protection ordinance and advanced policies that are now helping inform heat resilience efforts at the state level."
Leading by example
Ladd Keith opens an expert panel during the 2026 SAZ Heat Summit.
Ladd Keith, an associate professor of planning in the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, helps organize the summit.
"There's not any other city in the United States that's doing a continual heat summit like this with the range of partners that we have, so I think that's something to be really proud of. That said, of course, we still have a lot more work to do which is why we're all here," said Keith, who is also an associate research professor at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at U of A's Arizona Institute for Resilience.
Along with contributions by Romero, this year's event included remarks by Arizona State Chief Heat Officer Eugene Livar, Pima County Health Director Theresa Cullen, as well as multiple expert panel discussions on extreme heat and its health impacts. Romero moderated a panel with five local youth activists, each with firsthand experience of the threats posed by extreme heat and plenty of ideas to help officials better protect its community members.
As in previous years, a series of community action workshops in the middle of the day-long event invited participants to zero in on a particular aspect of community need in the face of extreme heat. This year, students in Keith's Master of Science in Urban Planning public participation course also received real-world experience through facilitating and documenting conversations at several of the workshops.
Findings from these smaller, interactive group sessions focused on the built environment, energy and the grid, public health and health care, community-level action, workforce heat protection and youth heat action will be reported to the U of A, City of Tucson, Pima County and the state of Arizona to support current heat planning efforts.
Heat planning saves lives.
Natural Building Works Founder and Owner Ray Clamons shows natural building materials to workshop participants.
Heat is the number-one weather-related killer in the U.S., claiming more lives every year than all other extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes and lightning combined. And, as data shows that global average temperatures continue to rise year after year, we should expect the health threats posed by such heat events to continue increasing over time, as well.
Tom Dang
As Tucson-based National Weather Service Operations Officer Tom Dang pointed out, the number and intensity of extremely hot days in Southern Arizona are rising steadily. Heat seasons in the region are also starting earlier and lasting longer than in previous years, nights are not cooling down as much as they used to, and the hottest days are even hotter today than they were just a few years ago.
“Another way to characterize that,” Dang says, “is the way that we define heat waves in the year 2025, they did not exist prior to 2017 here in Tucson.”
Of course, the most vulnerable among us are also those most prone to experiencing the negative health effects of extreme heat. This includes the elderly, individuals with pre-existing conditions, people who live alone, and those that are unhoused or are otherwise living in substandard housing, such as in uninsulated mobile homes.
Despite the increasing challenges associated with protecting vulnerable community members from extreme heat, the annual summit and associated planning efforts have already borne fruit. Heat deaths during moderate extreme heat events are trending down, for instance, as are heat-related deaths among the unhoused. Efforts to train employers in Tucson about heat risks to their employees also led to a 75 percent decrease in reported heat-related incidents among employers according to Tucson Assistant City Manager Kristina Swallow.
Collaboration is key.
Pima County Health Director Theresa Cullen addresses the crowd during opening presentations and remarks.
One theme that rose to the surface throughout the summit was the importance of collaboration – both intergenerational and cross-sector – to combat the negative health effects of extreme heat on our communities and residents.
"In this room are youth and elders, workers and researchers, organizers, public servants, funders and practitioners, each bringing different experiences and all essential to building heat resilience in southern Arizona," said Tucson Chief Resilience Officer Fatima Luna. "Heat affects all of us, but not in the same way. And because of that, no single organization or sector can address it alone."
Robert Meade
Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and summit attendee, recently ran an extreme heat simulation using data from northwest Maricopa County as a foundation. He says that work highlighted the need for collaboration to adequately address extreme heat events.
"In a lot of cities around the world, you do have increasing recognition of the need to be responding to heat, but this is usually siloed in many different organizations, in many different sectors," Meade said. "So, the city might have a resilience office, but how they're responding versus how electric utilities, for example, are responding might be different."
Meade added that the Southern Arizona Heat Summit is a "perfect example" of collaboration in action.
"Our third iteration of the heat summit continued to expand to include even more of the voices needed to advance heat resilience in our community, with its focus on the youth, manufactured home residents, and those in need of workplace heat safety," Keith said.
He and other partners at the U of A are looking forward to continuing this partnership with the local community to build a more resilient Tucson in 2026 and beyond. Plans for next year’s Summit are already underway.