Cooling Wyndham – one of Australia’s fastest growing municipalities– is challenging. Large canopy trees find it difficult to grow in our dry, grassland soils. There is also a lag between trees being planted and them growing to provide shade. So as part of our adaptation strategy, we sought to investigate alternative mechanisms for cooling our municipality.

Thermal imagery done of the municipality in the 2012-13 summer, demonstrated that our irrigated sports ovals were relatively cool compared to non-irrigated open space. Therefore, irrigation of more open space could be another mechanism to cool our municipality.

In the summer of 2015-16, working with Monash University, we monitored microclimates of two parks – one irrigated, one not irrigated. The monitoring was done through weather stations and thermal imagery. Working with our community, we recruited community volunteers to survey the park users to understand their thermal comfort levels.

Implementation learnings

-       Access to equipment and technical expertise through Monash was vital.

-       Our centralised volunteer recruitment process enabled us to work with community members previously unengaged with council.

-       The volunteers were excited to be involved in a project that brought together state of the art weather monitoring.

-       Project implementation was complex due to having to work through potential planning permit requirements, working with a local developer, alongside internal stakeholders. 

-       Flexibility was required to work with community volunteers.