Plant-covered roofs could help chill Brazil’s heat-stricken favelas
Favela do Alemao in Rio de Janeiro. Low-income urban communities like these tend to lack greenery and are more likely to face extreme heat than their wealthier or more rural counterparts. Ratao Diniz/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images This article was originally featured on Undark. Sweat was dripping down Luis Cassiano’s face. It was 2012, and Rio de Janeiro’s hottest day to date: At nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the seaside city had just barely beaten its previous record set in 1984. Cassiano and his mother, then 82, had lived in the same narrow four-story house since they moved to Parque Arará, a favela in northern Rio, some 20 years earlier. Like many other homes in the working-class community — one of more than 1,000 favelas in the Brazilian city of over 6.77 million...