Assessing the Impact of Cool Roofs on Health and Wellbeing: A Scoping Review

Extreme heat poses a threat to the health and wellbeing of millions of people worldwide living in climate-vulnerable housing. Cool roofs are a potential passive-cooling housing retrofit solution that is affordable and scalable to reduce heat exposure and improve community health and wellbeing.

To conduct a scoping review to systematically identify and map the research addressing the effect of residential cool roofs on health and wellbeing, identify knowledge gaps, and inform the design of future empirical studies.

Six online databases were searched from 1980 to July 2025 to identify relevant papers. We selected 14 publications that compared cool roofs with non-cool roofs, measured their effects on health and wellbeing, and summarised the data in a narrative synthesis.

All publications were modelling studies, with the majority (71%) examining the effects of cool roofs on urban heat island mitigation and their impact on health. Most (93%) of the assessed populations were in high-income countries. Estimates of the projected health benefits of cool roofs ranged widely across studies, depending on the study context, methodology, and outcomes.

While our scoping review identified modelling studies highlighting the potential benefits of cool roofs, the dearth of publications assessing their use in low-resource settings and the lack of empirical evidence underscore the need for further research to determine their effectiveness in structurally vulnerable communities.