Totally Cooked: Episode 23 – How is climate change impacting our cities, and why is Indonesia moving its capital?

Cities are where so many of us really experience climate change. They’re where heatwaves keep us awake at night, where flash floods turn streets into rivers, and where concrete, glass and asphalt can reshape the weather around us. As more than half of humanity now lives in urban areas, the story of climate change is increasingly a story about cities – how they amplify extremes, how they trap heat, and how smart planning might help protect the people who call them home.

In this episode of Totally Cooked, Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Iain Strachan are joined by Associate Professor Negin Nazarian, and PhD student Ressy Fitria. Diving into the science of urban climate – the hidden layer of weather that exists between skyscrapers and street trees. What exactly is an urban heat island? Do cities just experience climate change, or do they actually modify the climate themselves? And how well are our climate models capturing the complexity of real neighbourhoods?

We’ll also head to Indonesia, where a brand new capital city is rising in tropical Borneo. As Jakarta sinks and sea levels rise, Nusantara is being billed as a “smart forest city” built for the future. But what happens to heat, humidity and extreme weather when you replace tropical forest with high-density urban development? And can we truly design cities that work with the climate, rather than against it?

Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals.

Show Notes

In this episode, we look at:

• Urban climatology studies how cities create and modify their own climate — not just how they experience broader weather patterns — operating at scales from individual buildings all the way to regional weather systems
• Cities actively reshape the atmosphere through multiple mechanisms: unnatural building materials generate and trap heat, physical structures disrupt wind and punch holes in fog, impervious surfaces alter the water cycle, and human activity adds direct heat and aerosols
• The Urban Heat Island effect — where cities run measurably warmer than surrounding areas — has been observed since the 1800s, can reach up to 10 degrees difference, and is not simply a function of city size or population density but of how a city is designed
• Urban Cool Islands also exist, most commonly in arid environments like Oman where introducing shade and vegetation into a hot, dry landscape can make a city cooler than its surroundings — and at smaller scales within Australian cities near parks and coastlines
• Traditional weather stations are deliberately placed away from cities to avoid “contamination,” meaning satellite remote sensing is often the only tool available for urban climate data — but satellites measure surface skin temperature, not the air temperature humans actually experience
• Cities have largely been absent from global climate models, sometimes represented as nothing more than a flat concrete slab — a problem Negan has spent her career pushing back against with the phrase: cities are not rocks
• Australia has no national urban climate strategy, and despite some councils doing excellent work on tree coverage and development guidelines, crossing a council boundary can mean all those protections disappear — black roofs in Western Sydney, for example, should have been banned years ago and still haven’t been
• Indonesia is building a new capital city, Nusantara, on Borneo from scratch — motivated by Jakarta sinking, chronic flooding, and overdevelopment on Java — and the decision to proceed was formalised in just 40 days, faster than any meaningful climate planning could occur
• Resi’s PhD research models heat stress in Nusantara before and after urban development using a regional atmospheric model, finding consistent coastal warming and worsened heat stress near the coast, with more variable patterns inland
• Urban greening, cool roofs, and ventilation corridors are valuable adaptation strategies that meaningfully reduce heat exposure at the local level and lower cooling energy demand — but they are not a silver bullet and in future climates their benefits will likely fall short of the scale of the problem
• Climate-resilient urban design disproportionately benefits those who can afford it: evidence already shows that climate-smart buildings command higher property values, putting them further out of reach for the communities most exposed to urban heat
• Machine learning offers a genuine path forward for data-poor cities — training models on data-rich urban environments like Sydney and transferring that knowledge to climatically similar cities elsewhere — a key priority for the 21st Century Weather Centre of Excellence’s urban research agenda

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This episode will be released and available to stream and download on Friday 12th June, 2026.

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Why listen to Totally Cooked?

Because it’s time to feel empowered, not overwhelmed. Totally Cooked is a science-backed, straight-talking podcast about weather, climate change, and what it all means for life on Earth – especially here in Australia.

Hosted by climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and science communicator Iain Strachan, Totally Cooked breaks down how human activity is changing the Earth’s systems—from our skies to our seas—and what we can do about it.

From greenhouse gases to fire weather, supercomputers to Antarctic ice cores, this is climate science without the jargon, and where no subject is too complex or controversial.

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