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In Kroo Bay, a few dozen households now have new heat-reflective roofing sheets made from recycled plastics in a pilot programme – which will be expanded to cover 35% of residents across all informal settlements in Freetown. The sheets are being applied on to existing roofing sheets and on new buildings.

Temperature sensors are being used to capture data from the houses where the mirror sheets have been installed. And there is constant research, testing different techniques and technology to improve and scale up cooling within the informal settlements.
While a full evaluation will be made by the end of the year, officials say initial results show reductions in house temperatures by as much as 6C.

Zigzag patterns on walls could help cool overheated buildings, study finds
An architectural zigzag design can limit how much heat is absorbed by buildings – and emitted back to space
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Cheng’s team has proposed a structural wall design featuring a zigzag pattern that can reduce a building’s surface temperature by up to 3C compared with flat walls, without consuming any energy.

“With this kind of design, we can have a cooler building,” Cheng said. “So we can cut down energy consumption for cooling.”
The design consists of walls with a series of protrusions that create a zigzag shape when viewed from the side.

This configuration takes advantage of radiative cooling – a passive cooling strategy that reflects sunlight and emits long-wave infrared radiation through the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space.