Cooling hubs are kind. They are not enough.

The heat index in Iloilo touched 46 degrees on Black Saturday. PAGASA’s Dumangas station logged it at around two in the afternoon, the highest reading in the metro this year. The next day, Easter Sunday, it settled at 43. Anyone who stepped outside that week did not need a thermometer to know.

So when Iloilo City Mayor Raisa Treñas opened two Cooling Hubs along Diversion Road and near Jalandoni Bridge on May 6, the instinct behind them was sound. The execution, in fact, was creative — refurbished office materials, eco boards made from recycled plastic waste, City Health Office staff on site, capacity for twenty people from ten to four. That is real work, done quickly, with what was on hand. Credit where it is due.

But 20 people. Ten to four. Two locations. In a city of nearly half a million.

The hubs are not the problem. The problem is what they reveal — that Iloilo’s hot-season strategy is still organized around refuge rather than design. We send students home when the heat index hits 41 under Executive Order 024-A. We open cooled rooms when it climbs higher. We have not, as a city, asked the harder question: why is Diversion Road, our showcase corridor, this hot to begin with?

Some of it is geography and most of it is choice. The pedestrian and bike lanes from UP Stoplight to Taft North (a portion of Diversion Road) are wide, well-painted, and almost entirely without shade. Whatever the original renders showed — and several residents who followed the redevelopment recall a tree-lined promenade in the early presentations — what got built is concrete cooking in the sun.

The science here is not contested. A 2024 meta-analysis in Communications Earth & Environment, covering 182 studies across 110 cities, found that urban trees can lower pedestrian-level air temperature by up to 12 degrees Celsius, and that in tropical climates a mixed planting of deciduous and evergreen species cools roughly half a degree more than a single-species approach. The qualifier matters. Trees work, but only if we plant the right ones, in the right pattern, and let them grow. Royal palms on a sidewalk are not urban forestry; they are landscaping that will eventually drop a frond on someone’s windshield. Kadamu na sina sa UPLB.

The realistic ask is not grand. Convene the City Environment and Natural Resources Office, the City Architect, and forestry or biology faculty from UP Visayas and WVSU within the next quarter. Audit Diversion Road for plantable median and shoulder space. Specify acacia, narra, or whichever species the foresters recommend over the cosmetic choices. Add misting points — common in Singapore bus stops, far cheaper to run than air-conditioned containers — at the bare stretches. Install public drinking fountains. Keep the cooling hubs as emergency rooms, not climate policy.

The container van can save someone today. A tree-lined city protects everyone, every day, for the next fifty years. We should be building both — but only one of them outlives the administration that planted it.