Extreme heat

The Challenge

Extreme heat kills more people per year than any other climate disaster and negatively affects nearly every human activity and society worldwide. The magnitude of the danger cannot be overstated and the number of people exposed to extreme heat only rises as greenhouse gas emissions continue and the world urbanizes.

Over 1 billion

people lack access to basic cooling measures.

OUR APPROACH

Arsht-Rock builds resilience to extreme heat with the following strategies:

Targeted communications, warning systems, and actionable strategies: Arsht-Rock develops tools that cities and other jurisdictions can use to clearly and evocatively message the risks and solutions of extreme heat to their populations and engage stakeholders, including categorizing and naming heat waves.
Mobilize global experts, public leaders, and stakeholders in the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA) to accelerate implementation: Arsht-Rock connects EHRA and local, regional, and national leaders to co-create policies and implement projects which help people become more heat resilient, with a focus on vulnerable communities.
Build the evidence base for action: Arsht-Rock and EHRA work with global experts to quantify the economic and social consequences of extreme heat to cities and other jurisdictions, informing and inspiring leaders to act. We partnered with Vivid Economics to assess the impacts of heat on specific sectors and segments of the population, catalyzing policy and investment that reduces the risks and costs resulting from the effects of heat.
Create the conditions that bring heat resilience solutions to scale: Arsht-Rock and its partners are developing the tools, evaluation methods, and finance and insurance approaches that make heat resilience solutions implementable at a global scale.

JUST PUBLISHED!

Heat Action Platform 2.0

Created by leading extreme heat experts, the new version of the #HeatActionPlatform has a policy tool and nine modules that help you identify the dangers of extreme heat and design the solutions that work.

Explore the Heat Action Platform

Resilience in action

Explore our resilience solutions to learn about how Arsht Rock builds resilience to extreme heat

Heat Action Platform

The Heat Action Platform is a living, engagement-oriented tool for city officials, practitioners, and financial institutions to find guidance, both existing resources and tailor-made solutions, on reducing the human and economic impacts of extreme heat at the regional or municipal level. The platform offers opportunities to engage with world-leading experts across a diversity of disciplines to plan, fund, implement, and measure heat resilience actions.

Explore the Heat Action Platform

Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA)

We created the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA) in 2020 to deepen, expand, and accelerate action, aiming to deliver heat resilient solutions to 500 million people worldwide by 2030. Comprised of over 40 experts in public health, finance, humanitarian assistance, disaster management, climate science and risk, insurance, public infrastructure, engineering, and design, as well as city leaders, EHRA co-develops and delivers heat resilience solutions to the world’s cities.

Learn more about EHRA

Categorizing and naming heat waves

Arsht-Rock is developing and piloting a method to categorize heat waves based on their human impact. This will enable local authorities to better communicate heat risk, increase the flexibility of their emergency response, and highlight the human and infrastructure damage caused by heat waves.

Learn more about categorizing and naming heat waves

Arsht-Rock works with Vivid Economics to calculate and communicate the impacts of extreme heat on cities, states, and national jurisdictions in dimensions such as worker productivity losses and mortality, and key sectors of local economies such as tourism. This analysis is paired with modeled and real solutions to assess the potential for reducing human and economic impacts.

Read the reports

Heat Season

In 2021, Arsht-Rock launched a public campaign for cities to announce the start of dangerous hot weather (#HeatSeason), similar to how hurricanes and other natural disasters are communicated. The Heat Season campaign includes public communications and educational graphics for social media that highlight the risk of heat and how people can stay safe during heat waves.

Learn more about #HeatSeason

Chief Heat Officers

Arsht-Rock works with its core partner cities and organizations to unify the response to heat by appointing Chief Heat Officers, local officials focused on the risks and impacts of heat on their city residents. Chief Heat Officers in Miami-Dade County, USA, Athens, Greece, and Freetown, Sierra Leone lead the development and implementation of heat resilience policies and programs that meet the unique needs of their community.

Learn more about Chief Heat Officers

Why we work on extreme heat

Extreme heat and human health

Extreme heat already kills up to half a million people per year, making it the deadliest weather-related hazard in an average year. Heat is called the “silent killer” because its effects are often less easily visible than the physical destruction wrought by hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters. In 2019 alone, 108,000 people died from heat-related causes in Europe, and more than 130,000 people over age 65 died from heat exposure in China, India, and Japan. Extreme heat substantially and negatively affects mental and physical health for nearly everyone, with particularly negative impacts on the elderly, the very young, and marginalized people.

Why we work on extreme heat

Extreme heat in cities

Cities are heating up at twice the rate of global average warming due to the urban heat island effect and rapid urbanization. On average, cities around the world could warm by as much as 4°C by 2100. Over half of the world’s people already face higher temperatures in cities today. By 2050 indications are that up to 75% of the world’s population will face the challenges of heat waves.

Why we work on extreme heat

Economic costs of Extreme Heat

The chronic and acute effects of extreme heat take a heavy economic toll. Today, the United States loses an average of $100 billion annually from heat-induced declines in labor productivity alone. Without climate change mitigation or adaptation, in a normal year annual labor-productivity losses from heat will increase to $200 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050. In 2020 India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan lost 2.5–3 times the world average of working hours to heat. By 2030, hot regions of southern Asia and western Africa are expected to lose at least 5% of working hours due to excessive heat.

Why we work on extreme heat

It’s only getting hotter

The last seven years, from 2014–2020, have been the hottest years since record keeping began 140 years ago. Since the 1950s, and especially since the 1990s and early 2000s, climate change has further increased the intensity, frequency, and duration of heat waves globally, leaving more people vulnerable to heat-injury and heat-related death. Marine heat waves now occur 4–5 times more frequently than in the 1980s, and the area of land on earth affected by heat waves is expected to double by 2020 and quadruple by 2040. With increased climate change, heat waves and extreme heat are expected to become more frequent and intense.