While leaders gather at the COP27 United Nations climate summit in Egypt to address how to stem global warming, a handful of officials are working on the ground to tackle the effects of extreme heat in cities around the world after taking a role that did not exist until last year: chief heat officer (CHO).
From heatwaves in Athens, Greece, to drought in Mexico's Monterrey, CHOs are trying to ease the impacts of hotter summers that threaten the health and livelihoods of billions of urban residents.
The position was created through an initiative by the United States-based Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) at the Atlantic Council think tank, starting with the appointment of the world's first chief heat officer in Florida's Miami-Dade County in April 2021.
The group has since grown to eight heat officers, all who happen to be women, focused on protecting vulnerable residents from rising temperatures.
"...it's not just affecting women. But we mostly focus on supporting the most vulnerable and, in our case, women are the most vulnerable," Eugenia Kargbo, Africa's first chief heat officer, who was appointed in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, last year as part of the Arsht-Rock project.
In Europe, at least 15,000 people have died because of hot weather in 2022, according to data published this week by the World Health Organisation.
By 2050, heatwaves will affect more than 3.5 billion people globally — half of them in urban centres — as they grow in frequency, duration and intensity.
Health experts say this means billions of people are at risk of preventable death and illness from exposure to extreme heat, which can result in heat stroke or kidney failure and exacerbate heart or respiratory diseases, among other health problems.
Climate change is amplifying the "heat island effect", where urban areas are often several degrees warmer than nearby rural areas as materials prevalent in cities, like concrete and metal, absorb and later radiate heat, scientists say.
Today, more than 350 cities experience summer temperature highs of over 35° Celsius.
By 2050, about 970 cities will be at least that hot during the summer, according to the C40 Cities network of major cities working to slow climate change.
In Freetown, home to more than one million people, residents are "silently dying" from extreme heat, said Kargbo.
In the industrial city of Monterrey, in north Mexico, Surella Segú is also on a mission to raise awareness among the city's five million residents about the dangers of extreme heat.
Residents got a wake-up call in June and July, when they grappled with a severe drought that caused record water shortages, said Segú, who was appointed Monterrey's CHO in April.
"People are saying, 'Well, it's just another hot summer.' But the reality is that every year, it's getting hotter and hotter," she said.
About 70 per cent of Monterrey is experiencing the heat island effect, said Segú, noting that a lack of green public spaces and parks, especially in low-income neighbourhoods with homes that often do not have air-conditioning, means the city's poorest are the most exposed to extreme heat.
Eleni Myrivili, who became CHO for Athens last year, said the combination of a string of heatwaves and recent wildfires near Greece's capital this year brought attention to the issue of extreme heat.
"When it's very hot, cities empty out ... they become more like ghost towns and people retreat into their houses and this is how heat impacts economies in cities, because there's less commerce," said Myrivili.
While heatwaves are one of the biggest climate-related threats to human health, they rarely receive the same attention as more visibly devastating disasters, such as hurricanes, partly because heatwaves are not named or ranked, climate experts say.
Arsht-Rock recently launched the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, which brings together global experts and scientists — from groups such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organisation — to build a standard practice for naming and ranking heatwaves.
In July, Spain's city of Seville became the first in the world to name a severe heatwave — Heatwave Zoe — as daytime temperatures soared above 42° Celsius.
The writer is from the Reuters news agency
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times