PROUD PROFESSOR — Above, Stetson University professor Robert Maglievaz smiles with his climate and health students after the group addressed the DeLand City Commission about how to combat extreme heat in the city’s Downtown corridor. From left are Isabella Recanzone, Phoenix Medley, Veronica Piñero, Maglievaz, Juliet Tonkin, Hannah Quenga and Alexia Kagembega. Below, the students address the DeLand City Commission Dec. 4.
A group of Stetson University “climate ambassadors” visited the DeLand City Commission Dec. 4 with a unified message: The city should do more to keep residents and visitors cool and comfortable while outside.
The group of students were sharing the results of a semester-long project from professor Robert Maglievaz’s climate and health course. The intent of the course, he explained, was to use focused, local studies to help a group of environmental science and public-health students become “DeLand’s very first climate and health ambassadors.”
The group of students — Isabella Recanzone, Phoenix Medley, Veronica Piñero, Juliet Tonkin, Hannah Quenga and Alexia Kagembega — shared their findings with the City Commission, along with a few recommendations.
One big suggestion? More vegetation and cooler surfaces.
“We found out that while you guys were trying to beautify areas Downtown, like Chess Park, you were unknowingly implementing heat-mitigation strategies that lowered the heat in that area significantly,” Quenga said.
MEASURING THE HEAT — Pictured are the results of infrared thermography tests conducted this summer by Stetson University students in professor Robert Maglievaz’s climate and health class. In the pictures above, red represents the hottest surfaces, some having a surface temperature of more than 100-degrees Fahrenheit. Blue surfaces, like the shaded asphalt on Florida Avenue in the bottom right photo, are cooler surfaces, some sporting a 30-degree difference in surface temperature than the hot, unshaded brick in the measurements taken on Georgia Avenue.
In Downtown DeLand’s Chess Park, a canopy of trees shades most of the park, vegetation covers concrete walls and a fountain trickles water all day long. These small additions make a world of difference when it comes to the heat.
Leaves and shaded concrete, for example, have a lower “albedo” than stone in direct sunlight. Albedo measures the light reflected off of a surface, the students explained, and that light is transferred back into the surrounding atmosphere as heat.
Another example the students provided was the difference in temperature determined using infrared thermography between parking areas on West Georgia Avenue with no tree cover and covered parking areas just ablock away on South Florida Avenue.
“There’s about a 20-degree difference with this shading,” Recanzone said.
In short: Downtown DeLand needs more shade. And it’s not just to keep people from sweating when they walk back to their cars from lunch. The group of researchers made the case that ensuring the comfort of people milling around Downtown DeLand can reduce the incidence of heat-related illness and boost tourism and foot traffic.
Some of the students’ other suggestions included:
— construction of a “green parking garage” Downtown, complete with solar panels on the roof acting not just as moneymaking power generators, but as shade for parked cars,
— water fountains Downtown to alleviate the need for people to buy water bottles to stay cool,
— eventually replacing aging infrastructure with more environmentally friendly options like reflective roofs and permeable pavement,
— and integrating heat mitigation into the city’s code by incentivizing developers to build with heat in mind, and designating a member of the city’s planning staff as a “heat-mitigation coordinator” to work directly with developers and business owners.
“We truly believe that considering all of these suggestions is going to make a better place for our community and also bring more tourists to the city of DeLand,” Kagembega said.
The City Commission appreciated the students sharing their research, especially City Commissioner Dan Reed, whose Downtown bar Cafe DaVinci received a shoutout for good outdoor tree coverage, misters and providing free water to patrons.
Moving forward, City Manager Michael Pleus said the city could consider implementing some of the students’ suggestions into the city’s “Race to Zero” carbon-reduction strategy that DeLand is taking part in through the Florida League of Cities.
Problem-solvers
The end of this semester this month marks professor Robert Maglievaz’s first semester with Stetson University. Before teaching in the university’s public-health department, he was an employee at the Florida Department of Health in Volusia County for 20 years. Maglievaz worked a number of jobs there, but when he left he was working as an environmental-health administrator on projects like promoting strategies for people in Volusia County to stay safe and healthy in extreme heat.
Promoting heat-resilience strategies is important, he said, in the context of climate change and outside of it.
Startling recent data, he said, shows the potential in the coming decades for days with temperatures exceeding record heat index levels and nights where temperatures stay hot.
The effects of climate change are global and national, but we feel it locally, too.
“We’ve gotta have a plan,” Maglievaz said. “There’s a lot of people in DeLand who don’t have air conditioning.”
That’s why, when he was developing a course on the importance of talking about climate change and its effects on public health, the focus became extreme heat.
One goal with the course was to have his students start a dialogue in DeLand about developing potential solutions to problems posed by climate change, and, he said, his students did it by getting the attention of city leaders.
But above all, Maglievaz wants to see his students become problem-solvers.
“My hope is one of them … goes on to save the world I’m never going to see,” he said. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misattributed two quotes. This has been fixed.
