An ex-ante protocol compares temporary urban heat-relief options for equity, feasibility, environmental burdens and adaptive monitoring before resources are committed.
Cities increasingly use temporary cooling centres, extended opening hours, mobile units and transport support during extreme heat. These are often treated as emergency operations, with wider social, environmental and distributional impacts assessed only after deployment. This paper proposes an ex-ante impact-assessment protocol that treats temporary heat-relief measures as an urban adaptation portfolio rather than isolated facilities. It compares a no-action baseline with intervention bundles across five dimensions: heat-risk reduction, inclusion of vulnerable groups, operational feasibility, secondary environmental burdens, and reversibility under changing conditions. Open spatial data, facility records and locally defined vulnerability indicators populate a transparent impact matrix. Instead of forecasting individual behaviour, the protocol identifies who may benefit, who may remain underserved, and where maladaptation may arise through crowding, diverted medical capacity, extra energy demand or unequal transport access. Monitoring indicators and decision triggers are defined before implementation so opening hours, eligibility rules and temporary capacity can adjust as heat intensity and service availability change. A future district-scale case study may demonstrate the protocol in a Chinese city, but its data categories and decision steps are transferable. The contribution is a practical bridge between urban climate adaptation planning and impact assessment, supporting comparison of alternatives before emergency resources are committed.
Yixuan Zou is affiliated with Tongji University and studies urban resilience, impact assessment, and decision-support methods for climate adaptation under uncertainty.