We Name Hurricanes, Why Not Heat Waves?

the winter too. And even when it is really hot outside, like when temperature spiked in many parts of the world this summer, we often just chalk it up to the weather. Degrees and din Heathrow Airport recorded a record eighty nine degrees on Sunday. Okay, I'll grant it. That's pretty hot. Guy Johnson's probably very miserable, and that's your first word news. That attitude is a big problem, especially in cities. Extreme heat is now a major health threat that is sickening

and killing more and more people. This has led some cities to do something pretty interesting. The heat's not going away, so they've created a new job to learn how to live with it. They're called heat officers. This was a new one for me, so I asked the heat officers from two US cities to come on the show and tell us what it means to make a living battling heat. But first I check in with my colleague Linda Poon with Bloomberg City Lab. She covers why heat has become

top of mind in cities. So, you know, when we think about climate change, we're bombarded with a lot of stories about floods and hurricanes and wildfires. But one of the things that weirdly gets overlooked on a lot of the time is global warring means like things are actually getting warmer, right, So extreme heat in particular is often called the invisible killer because in the US it is

the largest killer of extreme weather. So extreme heat we don't see it, We don't see the devastation as prominently as hurricanes and stuff. So actually didn't know that. So more people in the US are killed by heat by extreme heat than by like hurricanes, wildfires and all the other things that we associate with climate change. Yep. Extreme heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather in the United States, causing more deaths on average than hurricanes and floods.

Combined over the past thirty years. Just to give you some perspective, it doesn't take very much to reach the threshold of extreme heat depending on where you are. UM. And if you sort of combine that with you know, the social vulnerability of certain communities, UM, it's really easy to have adverse health effects from heat. Not all cities are quite prepared to adapt to it. It is this killer that far exceeds you know, big extreme weather events

like hurricanes and floods. Cities can do something about it. You raised it. It's the next question, what are cities doing about this now? Because there seems to be a whole new trend now where world leaders are trying to do this at a very high level, but that cities really have become the forefront of new policies, uh, to try and figure out I guess more than just awareness, but actually trying to mitigate heat problems. So, yeah, if you think about where extreme heat is most dangerous, it's

gonna be cities. Right. There's just phenomenon called the urban heat island effect where cities are you know, a certain degree higher than places in the countryside or even in the suburbs. So cities are really at the forefront of heat. They're most at risk, and they also are the ones to come up with some of the most creative solutions. Right now, they're implementing heat strategies into their climate adaptation plans.

One of the things that you write about is how cities are trying to raise awareness by changing the way they talk about heat so that people realize, wait a minute, this isn't just a hot day, this is a problem. Yeah. So there's a lot of call to name heat because, like I said, he is invisible. So if we don't name it, we don't necessarily recognize it as you know, an extreme weather event. So on the one hand, there is this initiative to at least to even name the heat.

But then uh, cities like aspen Um and Civil Spain, they're piloting this idea where you like you said, you categorize heat um category one, two three, and it's sort of being piloted by the Atlantic castles um are Rock Rockefeller Foundation so quick Aside Year. The Arst Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center is a climate nonprofit that's named after its

founding donors, philanthropists Adrian Art and the Rockefeller Foundation. The center held a press conference to discuss this new initiative back in July, and we have a clip here of Dr Larry Kulkstein, the guy leading the team behind this ranking system. They are less meteorologically oriented and more oriented towards the impacts of the heat. Even a category one is dangerous in many cities. Category ones kill a number of people, they just don't kill as many as category three.

So it is important to know that a level one you do certain things, the level two you do those things and more. At a level three you do the maximum number of interventions or activities to make sure that people are safe, that the information is conveyed to the population, and that the urban area has designed a system to account for the fact that people are going to get ill and die in any of the three categories. So they are experimenting, they're working with city officials to really

find the right categorization. It's not one size fits all sort of categorization, right. It depends on the city itself, same rules, but different system for every city because each city has different weather, has different demographics, has a different urban structure, so the response to heat is different in every city. UM So it stands to be seen if

this will catch onto other cities. One thing that I found really interesting was UM if we think about in the US, a lot of delivery workers work in the sweltering heat, and there's this huge call for UPS drivers, USPS drivers, Amazon drivers UM for them to be protected because the best initiatives of these companies have come up

with is to tell the drivers to stay hydrated. Problem solved, right, So it's a matter of maybe changing up the trucks that they drive so that it can provide better air conditioning but also not be a detriment to the earth. So it's thinking about the transportation vehicle and you know what policies UM can be set so that workers aren't outside and like the holliest time during the day. You're describing what cities are doing now to try to in some way get this under control or at least minimize

the effect. How is it different the way cities look at heat now build policies around heat now versus the way they did, say just ten years ago. It's a lot about thinking about heat not as an afterthought, but thinking about how different policies would increase or decrease sort of the heat exposure of people. If we think about

where to put buildings. He has to be the forefront everything about you know, lot of cities nowadays are looking at you know, if putting up a new building destroys trees, what needs to be done so that development does not um make things worse? Yes, right, So they're trying to be more forward thinking. Um So a lot of this is about just coordinating. At least in the US, a lot of the departments are siloed, so it's about bringing all them together to the table and thinking, hey, if

you do this will increasing impact of heat. How can we change it so that we're thinking about heat as the main consequence of whatever policy you implement. So thanks to Linda, we've now heard about some of the problems extreme heat causes. When we come back, I talked to two people whose job it is to fix it. This year's You and Climate Change conferences happening. While global leaders argue what or how to slow the warming of the planet, communities are left to deal with a failure to make

that happen. There's nothing a city can do to lower the Earth's thermostat, so instead, a small but growing number of local officials are searching for ways to make living with the reality of extreme heat more bearable and less deadly. I am really pleased today to have the chief east officers for two major American cities here with us. We have Jane Gilbert, the Chief Heat Officer for Miami Dade County, and Marches Sura, the Chief Heat Officer and Climate Emergency

Mobilization Director for the City of Los Angeles. I gotta say, Martha, you have really got Jane beat on the title department. She can have my title any day. I agree. Well, thank you so much for being here. Let me just ask the question. It is a chief Heat officer. So I was the first, and it was only a little over a year ago, right, and and I think there's

going to be another one announced this month. So um, Really, we're looking at how is heat impacting people in their homes, at their workplaces, as they're going to and from work, as they're playing and recreating outside, and what can we do to both mitigate urban heat islands and help people to manage the inevitable extreme heat. Let me just talk you just right there. That's really good explanation. But tell

me what an urban heat island is. Basically, an urban heat island is found in inner cities where there's a lot of concrete, where there's a lot of buildings, there's a lack of trees and shade. And then what it does is the heat exacerbates the pollution in the area.

So instead of just having your everyday pollution, this air pollution stagnates, and the stagnation of that pollution causes more public health impacts, increases people's utility bills, increases company's utility bills because these buildings are hotter as a result of the urban heat island. The long term effect with extended heat waves is that people's bodies don't recover as quickly over a period of three days. You know, if you don't have the chance to cool down, that's when heat

related deaths really go up. You describe the problem, but what is it that you usually do. You are sort of tasked with just making sure it doesn't get worse. I think the first thing is to understand who's most at risk. We're all at risk to extreme heat, but there's some of us that are more exposed and more

sensitive to extreme heat. We looked at where the highest number of emergency room visits and hospitalizations related to extreme heat are and looked at the geographic and demographic characteristics of those zip codes and and now understand not surprisingly that people, very low income people, outdoor workers, and areas with very high land surface temperatures are where we see

the most severe heat related illnesses. It's important to understand really what's the full scope of the problem and under what conditions are people dying. And what we learned is is that the majority of heat related deaths is actually under our current emergency advisory threshold for extreme heat here in Miami dates, so that needs to be shifted, and we're working with the National Weather Service. We need to focus our tree planting in those areas with the lowest

tree canopy and the highest poverty rates. So you said a lot about how so much of this disproportionately affects lower income is and is really kind of part of a lot of historical neglect. If you live in an air conditioned home and can afford your utility costs and drive in an air conditioned car and work in an air conditioned environment, it's fine. But there are people who are unhoused. There are people who can't afford their air conditioning or their window unit breaks out, and they can't

afford to replace it. I spoke to a woman last weekend who had that, and for three months this summer she was without a c that's life or death situation. We have three hundred thousand people who work outside every day.

They're exposed to this day in and day out. So it takes sometimes for people to be made aware that while they may not be feeling the heat, so to speak, their neighbors and essential workers are I completely agree with what Change said, and I'll only add that where you have the greatest pollution burden, particularly in Los Angeles, you have the greatest number of pre existing health conditions like asthma, COPD,

kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes. So when you take their health into consideration, and the pollution burden consideration, and the lack of infrastructure because of historical disinvestments, you realize that we really need to overhaul how we look at that

built environment from a system's perspective. We want to make sure that we use no less than forty of those infrastructure investments and climate investments in these communities that have born the burden, and in l A we call them sacrifice zones and frontline communities, and they have been living a climate emergency much longer than the rest of us.

We're actually taking information and advice and wisdom from communities, and we just delivered a report to the Climate Emergency Mobilization Mission on how the residents want to decarbonize Los Angeles, and that's going to advise the Council on our decarbonization policy about how we will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions

in Los Angeles by reducing the emissions from buildings. But we have to make sure it's equitable, that it's safe, that tenants aren't being displaced, and that the rent for tenants isn't increasing as a result of our intent to make them healthier communities. So it sounds like in ordered for any of this to work, you're going to get to have a lot of buy in from not just

politicians and business leaders, but from the communities themselves. Who are the stakeholders, who are the people you're trying to persuade in to bring along. Yeah, we can't do this alone. Even I'm working across county departments, but I have thirty four municipalities within Miami Dade County. We have a state Department of Health, we have a National Weather Service, all of them need to be activated towards addressing this problem.

I guess want the challenges you may phase, especially in Los Angeles and Miami, is you know, like you said, it's hot there, and so people are like, yeah, it's a little hotter today, must be a heat wave, and they don't necessarily associate that with climate. Are you having a hard time getting people to understand the difference between

those two I think the critical thing is to use data. Right, We've had over seventy more days on average with a heat index over ninety than we did in the nineteen sixties, and we're expected to have traumatic increases in even more dangerously high heat days heat and exist of a hundred and a hundred and five. So we're supposed to have fifty more days a year with a heat index over a hundred by mid century. That's well over a month and a half more days with that excessive high heat.

It's that kind of data that helps people understand the difference. I agree we need to though simplify that. Basically, we have six times the number of heat waves, six times from from wind. That's that's from the early two thousand's six times greater number of heat waves greater number of heat waves in Los Angeles, and they're longer. They're not one day, they're not two days. Last time it was almost two weeks. Are heat wave lasted for two weeks.

So when you make people understand or help people understand that their bodies can't recover because it's an extended heat wave if they leave live in these urban heat islands, and that's what's causing these exacerbated deaths and hospitalizations. When you connect it to their health and to their livelihood and their well being, I think that really helps us

convey the message. Right, So Los Angeles is trying to use that as a way by which we talk to people through our heat Really for Los Angeles campaign, we absolutely need to make sure people really understand the risks associated with extreme heat and how they can better manage. So we you know, in Miami, we don't have extreme heat waves like you might have more on the West Coast. We have chronic high heat. We have five months with just about every day with the heat index over ninety degrees.

So we declare May one through October thirty one a heat season, and the mayor charged me with raising public awareness on the level that we already do now for hurricane preparedness, radio, television, p s as, billboards and bus shelter ads in the targeted zip codes that I mentioned earlier, all in English, Spanish, Haitian creole. And listen to our

stakeholders with lived experience about where get their information. When we come back to my conversation with the heat officers continues, you had mentioned that it's had a lot of the time where you are, but for you and for your colleagues in other places where you know there are more seasons, UM, do you find it's harder to do your jowin it's cold outside? We just work on the infrastructure, then, you know, because we're not only working on communications, we're working on policy.

I don't work alone or in a silo. The main goal of my office is to unsilo the city UM in terms of making partnerships with the Emergency Management Department, the Public Works Department, the Department of Water and Power. And while we're not out there conveying and communicating, we're in here building policies and grants for bringing more funds to create the infrastructure that we need to protect us

and to get a small climate adopted. Martin California passed a law that says that you are going to start naming and ranking heat waves similar to the way hurricanes are named. Um, what does this has of that? What

does that actually do well? I think the goal of to help convey and communicate how severe the heat wave will be to everyday people without getting too technical, Like you know, we just had herricane Fiona here, it could be heat wave Fiona, and we know when there's a Cat three hurricane coming up, we know what we need to do, the supplies we need to put in place,

the evacuation plans we need to put in place. We know that you don't expect someone to go out and deliver a pizza during that time, But do you expect someone to deliver that pizza during a heat wave? Yes, and that could put them under risk. So I think that's the idea where a heat wave is. It gives people clear understanding of what actions you need to take under these more extreme conditions. And now I think the challenges making the leap and letting people know that extreme

heat is our primary climate hazard. Yes, while sea level rise storm served hurricanes as a risk, actually extreme heat is the number one cause of death there are more heat officers. We're talking about small numbers overall, but more heat officers overseas. Then in the US, do you coordinate with him a lot of do you share tips? I had a chance to talk to a Lenny Malvelli from Athens, Greece,

and she simplified the process for me. When you speak from the heart, and which she did, and when you speak with passion about the work that you're doing and you simplify it, I think that's the best way to convey what you're trying to say. But also influll change. Thank you so much for being here and taking so much time. This is just fascinating. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's the daily podcast from Bloomberg and

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