Firefighters work on the zone of a forest fire within the hills in Quilpue comune, Valparaiso region, Chile on February 3, 2024.
Javier Torres | Afp | Getty Images
A quiet revolution is underway to deal with a widely underestimated climate challenge: extreme heat.
Local authorities have appointed several chief heat officers (CHOs) in cities worldwide lately to organize residents for increasingly frequent and severe bouts of excessive heat.
“They call it the silent killer,” said Eleni Myrivili, who serves as the worldwide CHO for the U.N.’s human settlement program and previously worked in the same role for the Greek capital of Athens.
Myrivili said she believes that extreme heat is commonly missed since it lacks the visible drama of roofs being ripped from homes or streets being become rivers.
“Heat, I feel it to the underside of my heart, goes to be the primary public health challenge that we shall be coping with in the following decade. And we want to organize for it now,” Myrivili told CNBC via videoconference. “We are able to — but we actually need to make it a priority.”
Heat is the leading weather-related killer within the U.S. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that greater than 1,700 deaths were the results of heat-related causes in 2022, roughly double the toll of 5 years prior. Researchers have said these are likely conservative estimates.
Most individuals would not know that in Australia, extreme heat kills more people than bushfires and floods and storms. There is a reason for that, and it is the lag in the info.
Tiffany Crawford
Co-chief heat officer of Melbourne, Australia
The CDC defines extreme heat as summertime temperatures which might be significantly hotter and/or more humid than average.
Older adults, young children and other people with chronic diseases are recognized as amongst probably the most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses, resembling heat exhaustion or heat stroke. The CDC warns that even young and healthy people could be affected.
Miami, U.S.
The primary person on the earth to be assigned as a CHO was Jane Gilbert, who was appointed in 2021 to oversee Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade.
“We now have relatively high [air-conditioning] penetration, but with our rising temperatures, electricity bills are only through the roof. We have also had the electricity rates go up. AC could be over 50% of what the electricity bill so individuals are selecting between AC and putting food on the table for his or her families,” Gilbert told CNBC.
A coastal metropolis within the southern U.S., Miami is internationally known for its vulnerability to sea-level rise and hurricanes. Yet Gilbert said community-led surveys have identified chronic heat as probably the most pressing climate concern.
View of the Miami Bay entrance channel in Miami, Florida during a heat wave on June 26, 2023.
Giorgio Viera | Afp | Getty Images
For six months of the yr, Gilbert said temperatures in Miami exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 degrees Celsius) almost day by day, posing a very big problem for outdoor staff.
To assist reduce the risks to the county’s population of two.7 million, Gilbert said her team’s motion plan focused on informing and preparing people for extreme heat, helping to chill homes affordably and dealing to chill community neighborhoods to tackle the so-called “heat island effect” — whereby a city incurs much warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas.
In practice, Gilbert said the measures included broad-scale marketing campaigns targeting the zip codes and demographics known to be most in danger, working with the national weather service and emergency management teams to update advisory and warning levels. Additionally they involved installing 1,700 efficient AC units in public housing and ensuring that recent inexpensive housing requires probably the most efficient cooling systems, resembling cool and solar-ready roofs, to maintain utility costs down.
“We wish to deal with the foundation reason behind this problem while we’re helping people adapt,” Gilbert said.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
“All of us here have grown up in a typically hot and humid environment. We’re used to the warmth in order that makes it really hard to tell apart between normal heat and unsafe heat,” Bushra Afreen, CHO for Dhaka North in Bangladesh, told CNBC via videoconference.
Afreen, who became Dhaka North’s CHO in May last yr, said stark income inequality within the country’s largest city meant excessive heat was not a universally similar experience.
“If you mix that with fragile urban systems like drainage and power outages and poor health management and poor health systems and poor education systems, you get a really bad stew.”
Right away, the 2 reactions that we’re seeing most are ‘good job, stick with it, we want more awareness.’ And the opposite kind is, ‘oh, you are going to decrease the warmth? Good luck.
Bushra Afreen
Chief heat officer for Dhaka North in Bangladesh
Alongside planting 1000’s of trees in Dhaka North’s informal settlements and reintroducing a culture of water fountains in the town, Afreen said her team would roll out a pilot project in a single city settlement to create green nooks and corners for reprieve.
Afreen said it might be vital to think about the style of trees to plant, resembling citrus or neem trees to ward off mosquitoes amid a dengue outbreak. Sufficient lighting, a bench, CCTV cameras, a water fountain and signs urging priority for girls and kids would even be vital, she added.
A Rickshaw puller splashes water on his face to get relief during a heatwave in Dhaka, Bangladesh on May 10, 2023.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
“Right away, the 2 reactions that we’re seeing most are ‘good job, stick with it, we want more awareness,'” Afreen said.
“And the opposite kind is, ‘oh, you are going to decrease the warmth? Good luck.'”
Melbourne, Australia
Tiffany Crawford, co-CHO of Melbourne, told CNBC that extreme heat kills more people in Australia than bushfires, floods and storms.
“There is a reason for that, and it is the lag in the info,” she said.
Crawford, who works alongside Krista Milne as CHOs of Melbourne, said the true scale of heat-related deaths and illnesses often doesn’t became clear until health authorities have pored through hospital admissions and ambulance data.
With a population of roughly 5 million, the southeastern Australian city of Melbourne is understood for its mild and temperate climate — but Crawford says it’s liable to spates of summer heatwaves that last for several days and offer scant reprieve through the night.
Environmental activists gather on the intersection of Flinders Street Station on December 09, 2023 in Melbourne, Australia. The eastern seaboard of Australia is facing a severe heatwave, with temperatures predicted to exceed 40 degrees celsius in lots of places. The new weather might be a trigger for devastating bushfires.
Diego Fedele | Getty Images News | Getty Images
“There’s an extreme northerly wind blows that’s just ferocious. I liken it to going outside and it’s like someone left the oven door open or the heater on all night and forgot to show it off,” Crawford said.
Among the short-term interventions which were put into place in Melbourne include extending public library and pool hours and rolling out so-called cool kits, which contain water bottles, neck towels and old-fashioned fans.
Looking ahead, Crawford said the town was in conversation with Google to offer constituents with so-called online-mapped “cool routes,” which help users navigate the town by making the most of existing shade or cover cover.
“In places like Europe, the dialogue within the media is a bit different, the warmth is shocking. Whereas in Australia, the warmth is something that was consistently lived with, and we are going to proceed to live with it, nevertheless it is those variables, like several climate response, they have gotten increasingly pronounced,” Crawford said.
“We’d like to plan around that.”