By Zahra Hirji and David Stringer, Bloomberg
Cities are on the frontlines of unrelenting high temperatures that are shattering records in 2024. In recent months, heat waves have forced school closures from Delhi to Manila. In Thailand, more people have already died from heat this year than in all of 2023.
The impacts will get worse as global temperatures continue to climb. Once-in-a-century rates of heat-related excess deaths are now forecast to occur as frequently as every 10 to 20 years.
Five urban centres are working to mitigate this threat by deploying chief heat officers, with more expected to follow. These stewards of city life coordinate work to provide residents with relief from high temperatures, to adapt cities for a warming world and to raise awareness of the risks posed by an oft-underestimated danger.
Since the first chief heat officer was appointed in Miami-Dade County in 2021, the network established with the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center has extended to Athens, Melbourne, Dhaka North in Bangladesh and Freetown in Sierra Leone. The officials — all women — routinely share solutions, and are effectively developing a global playbook to counter rising temperatures. Given the impact heat is having on people’s lives and livelihoods, that playbook will only grow more vital in the coming decades. These five CHOs share what they see as the most important functions of their jobs:
Make sure people understand heat risks
“When I first started, there were people like: ‘Why do we need a chief heat officer? Miami, we know heat. We know how to handle it.’ And it’s true. We’re more acclimatised to heat than people in Boston, say. But still, when we get even small increases in our heat index, it can make people more vulnerable. We also are projected to have the highest increase of dangerously high heat indexes of any other county in the US.” —Jane Gilbert, chief heat officer for Miami-Dade County
“So many people are actually surprised to hear that more people die of heat in Melbourne than any other capital city in Australia — and that’s largely because of our variable climate. Heat is more challenging when the body doesn’t have a chance to adapt over time. It can be 20C and the next day it can be 35C. People that might have other challenges or medical conditions or aren’t aware that heat is coming, they don’t take necessary precautions.” —Krista Milne, co-chief heat officer for Melbourne
“Heat is a silent killer. You cannot see the damage that it can do. That is why awareness is so important. That’s why we need to be prepared before we leave in the morning to go to work. Dress properly, not heavily. Carry water with us. Choose a cool route to go home.” —Elissavet Bargianni, chief heat officer of Athens
Identify the most vulnerable groups
“We hired a researcher out of Florida State University, Dr. Chris Uejio. Basically, he looked at emergency department visits and hospitalisations by zip code in Miami-Dade County, and then looked at what were the correlating factors in those high zip codes. First thing, huge disparity — some zip codes had four or five times the rates of ER visits and hospitalisations than other zip codes. The top correlating factors are high poverty rates; high land surface temperatures, or urban heat islands; high percentage of outdoor workers, particularly in our South Dade region; and a high percentage of households with children.” —Jane Gilbert (Miami-Dade)
“You have so many people who don’t even get access to a steady supply of electricity. They don’t have access to electric fans or ceiling fans. I’m not even going to mention air conditioning. It’s estimated that 900,000 households are currently living in Dhaka in informal settlements. These are people who are poor, who are trying to make it paycheck to paycheck. And then you have vulnerable groups within those communities. Recently, the schools closed nationally — who do you think had to take care of all those children? These women have jobs, but in a conservative, traditional family that doesn’t have access to daycare or childcare, who would be expected to not go to their work, or to sacrifice their jobs and stay home and look after a kid?” —Bushra Afreen, chief heat officer for Dhaka North
“There’s many people that we’ve had stories of during hot nights sleeping in stairwells or under trees because they simply don’t have a way to cool down in their apartment. There are pockets of vulnerable communities who are suffering energy poverty, and either don’t have access to air conditioning or choose not to put it on because of the price of energy. It’s a decision about whether to buy groceries that week or turn on their air conditioning. One of the ambitions that we have within our Heat Safe City principles is that everyone has access to a cool place to go within 300 metres of their house.” —Krista Milne (Melbourne)
Provide immediate heat relief
“We installed 1,700 efficient AC units in public housing that were under the county’s care prior to last summer. So that was life-saving for those people.” —Jane Gilbert (Miami-Dade)
“Last year, we had seven cool centres. They are air-conditioned rooms that all people can go to. We have combined the Help at Home Plus programmes that we have for vulnerable populations — we have social workers going to houses to check if people are OK and we also used a programme in order to take people, if they wanted, to cool [centres].” —Elissavet Bargianni (Athens)
“Something we trialed this most recent summer: activating a network of air-conditioned places on hot days that are specifically targeted as a place of respite for people that need them. We did that in multiple ways. One was using our own libraries and recreation centres, and they are marketed as welcoming on those hot days — that people can come and we open them for longer than they might ordinarily be. And the other way is we sought interest from the community who had those facilities that met certain criteria and we provided grants so that they could stay open as well.” —Krista Milne (Melbourne)
Redesign cities for heat resistance
“We’ve really increased our tree planting. We went from planting about 7,500 a year to 10,000 to last year over 16,000 trees — and [we] gave away an additional over 10,000 trees to homeowners. All Florida-friendly or native trees and really marketing [to] the areas that we need it most. We began inventorying our trees so that we can count them as the infrastructure that they are, because they don’t only mitigate heat, but they absorb stormwater and they provide so many other ecosystem benefits to our neighbourhoods.” —Jane Gilbert (Miami-Dade)
“Nobody really understood the impact of cutting down hundreds of massive trees that acted as mini cooling stations, that acted like heat mitigators and air pollution mitigators. The people who grew and developed the city, they didn’t have any of this in their plan. Now after two decades or three decades, this is now being really highlighted in these conversations. The solutions are coming. They’re a little too late, but I’m still grateful that they’re coming.” —Bushra Afreen (Dhaka North)
“We need to work with the private sector in order to deliver on our ambitions. That means not just looking at nature in streets and in laneways and in parks, but also the way that we’re building our buildings. The way that we’re retrofitting our buildings. How do we both bring down the emissions, but also deliver a building stock in Melbourne that is cooler and that can contribute to climate adaptation.” —Tiffany Crawford, co-chief heat officer for Melbourne
Tags: Bushra Afreen, Elissavet Bargianni, Extreme heat, Heatwaves
