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If you’ve ever driven from the country into the city and marveled at how the temperature dramatically spiked, you’ve felt the urban heat island effect.

As global temperatures rapidly climb, scientists, governments, and activists are scrambling for ways to counter the heat island effect.

By 2050, seven in 10 people will live in cities, says the World Bank.

“I really see cities as kind of a canary in the coal mine type of situation, where you have a little bit of a harbinger of what the rest of the planet could be experiencing,” says Portland State University climate adaptation scientist Vivek Shandas, who has studied the heat island effect in over 50 US cities.

Take the problem of cooling roofs, says environmental engineer George Ban-Weiss, who studies cool infrastructure at the University of Southern California.

But while these changes would make life more bearable for the people inside each modified building, if enough owners followed suit, in some areas it could have an unintended regional side effect.

“So that means less clean air coming into the city, which would tend to make pollutant concentrations higher,” says Ban-Weiss, plus the loss of the breeze that itself keeps people cool.

“It's kind of a tug of war,” says Ban-Weiss?

“Then the people in the very neighborhood the investment was meant to help get displaced off into places that are heat islands or other kinds of climate risk zones,” says Sawin?

And since the science of urban heat is still young, it’s not always clear which strategy is best to follow.

Has the heat island effect already gotten so bad in some places that they can’t support certain species.

The city of the future may be both more reflective and greener, with both strategies being used in concert to mitigate the heat island effect

But in terms of cooling effects, says Ban-Weiss, it’s hard to beat vegetation when it comes to the many simultaneous benefits they provide