Climate change represents one of the most challenging and important research topics of the 21st century. Rising global temperatures, particularly in urban areas, has prompted an influx of research not only on changes in physical conditions, but also on the increasing vulnerability of human health and well-being as a result of global and regional climate change. Recent studies indicate that temperatures vary significantly even within the same urban environment and that vegetation plays an important role in mitigating against warm temperatures in some urban areas while bare soil and impervious surfaces store heat, exacerbating high temperatures in other metropolitan areas. This poster reports on current research efforts investigating physical conditions of climate as well as human perceptions and experiences with heat stress while quantifying local vegetation among 40 neighborhoods throughout the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area. Our research indicates four critical points: 1) exposure to extreme heat is variably distributed among survey neighborhoods; 2) climate change is a social equity issue whereby some racial/ethnic groups are burdened with greater exposure and fewer resources to cope with extreme heat compared to others within the same study area; 3) public perceptions of climate change correlate with environmental conditions at fine spatial scales of analysis; and 4) the relationship between physical elements of the urban landscape (i.e., urban vegetation, green areas) are strongly associated with exposure to extreme heat.