The Belfast Heat Walking Tour was one of the most enjoyable activities during the Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave project, generating very useful information for our research into communication methods, as well as being engaging and interesting for attendees.Victoria Ramsey at the Met Office, who I co-led the walk discussed its benefits in her research published in Climate Services:
“Participants found this form of communication helpful for putting the information into context and improving their understanding of heat risk within the city. They found the workshop helpful in understanding how to use the data products in decision making.”
Given the success of the first tour, I have run it again multiple times and developed other similar tours across Northern Ireland and the UK. Here’s a summary of the all the other tours that have come about since.
- Firstly, I have led more Belfast heat tours with a general public audience as part of the Northern Ireland Science Festival in 2023 and 2024. I have also led the tour for masters and undergraduate students at Queen’s University Belfast. Although the tours follow the same rough route, there have been some minor tweaks along the way and the different audiences and questions every time are a great way to keep the tour interesting and fresh. For example, often now I will discuss some other impacts of climate change in the city, not just heat, particularly where the tour crosses the Lagan and it is possible to see the new Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme.
- It turns out heat walking tours are not new, and in 2023 I went on a heat walk of London with Julie Futcher and Chris Newman, both who had run tours before (in Julie’s case for many years all around the world). Inspired by this, I went on to lead a similar urban heat-themed walking tour in Bristol for my research group at the University of Bristol. I will be running this session again as a side event after the next UK National Climate Impacts meeting, which is to be held in the city in September 2025.
- Beyond heat, for the Northern Ireland Science Festival in 2024 and 2025 I have also co-led a tour about climate change and how we can adapt to it at the National Trust’s Mount Stewart site in Northern Ireland. This talk touches on all sorts of important changes that rural Northern Ireland faces, from sea level rise to unpredictability of rainfall. Having initially started working with the National Trust during Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave, since 2023 I have been leading in a side project to understand Mount Stewart’s unique microclimate and how the site can be adapted to deal with climate change. More on that in a post very soon…
- Finally, I ran climate walks for families at the Stendhal music festival, near Limavady in Northern Ireland, in 2024. This tour highlighted climate change in broad terms, how it might affect Northern Ireland (particularly rural areas) and some of the things we can do reduce its impacts. We also measured the microclimates around the festival site and I even brought my mandolin and sang an old folk song about Northern Ireland’s changing environment centuries ago.
These tours have continued to receive good feedback as an engaging way to communicate environmental research. For example, from the 2025 Northern Ireland Science Festival tour of Mount Stewart we had all 5 star reviews and some lovely comments:
“Loved it!”
“Excellent workshop, so fascinating”
“I thought the combination of Andy and Alan’s knowledge really brought the talk to life”
“Very interesting”
“The hosts were very informative, available and friendly”
I genuinely believe this is one of the best communication methods I have ever used. Telling a story through place, allowing people to see it with their own eyes and not through a screen, and being active and encouraging walking (an excellent solution to the climate crisis) makes this a win-win-win in my opinion. I have intentions to develop further tours in the near future.
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A final note: following the original Belfast walking tour, we ran a workshop with our city stakeholders during which we mapped out the decision making processes around heat-health and building management in the city. In my first post about this back in 2022, I included a picture of the ‘visual notes’ that I illustrated for building management, however at that stage I had not completed the heat-health visual notes. Better late than never, I have made heat-health notes – take a look and let me know what you think!
