Extreme heat is among the “biggest concerns” humanitarian agencies have around climate change, and governments are blocking access to data needed to reduce its harm, according to leading humanitarian and health experts.
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“The past is no longer a guide to future — with heat waves what we've seen very clearly are unprecedented events that we never could have imagined before,” Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre, told Devex on the sidelines of the COP 26 climate summit.
But even as an issue of rising concern to specialists, extreme heat has received relatively scant policy attention, even at the largest ever climate change summit in Glasgow, which featured numerous side events on adaptation and global health.
“Heat extremes are frankly, from the perspective of humanitarian impacts, one of our biggest concerns — you see that in Europe and in the United States for instance. In many developing countries, we’re not even counting the dead due to heat waves, but we know they exist,” said van Aalst, who is also a climate scientist and a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“We usually think about extreme weather events and infectious diseases, you think about crops, you don't heat as a health hazard, but heat waves … they are potentially lethal,” Marina Romanello, research director at the Lancet Countdown, which tracks the connections between public health and climate change.
While Romanello said “heat related mortality is going up on a global scale and [heat] exposure is increasing,” she noted its importance was “generally not” appreciated.
The impact of extreme heat is felt mostly by the poor people living in cities. “Urban spaces generate … a ‘heat islands’ effect, particularly when you don’t have windspaces around and you don’t have good urban planning. So they get a lot warmer than surrounding areas,” Romanello told Devex at the WHO pavilion in COP 26.
“If the urban poor don’t have access to water, to cooling centers, to care, they are particularly exposed,” she added, noting that infants, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, are particularly at risk. People who work outdoors, particularly in agriculture and construction, are also especially vulnerable. “If it becomes a ‘work or get fired' issue, people literally die at work,” said van Aalst.
“There has been an extreme shift in the weather in this season, reaching up to 45 degrees [Celsius] in some parts of the nation and it has affected the way of life for those who work outside of offices,” Faith Mvududu, mental health first aider at the Lily Blossom Academy, wrote to Devex from Zimbabwe — which she said was currently experiencing a strong heat wave.
“Personally it has affected my timetable of work, as I am trying my best to cool off, thus causing unnecessary distraction and delay in the work I do [with] diminished focus,” she added. Mvududu also said there was a risk of wildfire outbreaks, less crops, and that there were more mosquitoes around — a malaria risk.
“The past is no longer a guide to future — with heat waves what we've seen very clearly are unprecedented events that we never could have imagined before.”
— Maarten van Aalst, director, Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate CentreThe effects of extreme heat on the human body are numerous and nasty. “Overheating of the body is lethal, [human] physiology completely changes when exposed to extreme heat,” said Romanello. While the health impacts of extreme heat are not fully understood, in part because of how new it’s frequency and affected geographies are, it can directly cause symptoms such as strokes and kidney failure. It might also have a longer term deteriorating effect on the body, as well as cause mental health issues, said Romanello.
Both Romanello and van Aalst cited this year’s record breaking heat wave in Canada — where temperatures reached 49.6 degrees Celsius in British Columbia, killing at least 570 people — as an example of the damage heat waves can cause in a well resourced country with a strong government.
Iraq also suffered extreme heat in 2021, with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius, complicated by the fact that the country’s infrastructure is “crumbling after years of war,” according to van Aalst.
But assessing how many people have already been killed or harmed by heat waves in many lower-income countries is difficult. “We know in Indian cities, thousands are dying, but in many developing countries there are not good mortality statistics,” said Van Aalst, who added that death certificates tend not to record heat as a cause of mortality, instead citing a cause such as dehydration.
Both he and Romanello said it was very difficult to access daily mortality statistics of many countries, despite the data’s importance for monitoring the severity of a heat crisis and the effectiveness of interventions.
“If the relationship between temperature and mortality changes, it’s because something has happened on the ground, and we need to be able to monitor that,” said Romanello. She said countries not sharing this health data was “the main obstacle the health community has [from] being able to protect us.”
Health should be at the heart of climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, taking lessons from lower-income countries where adaptations to higher temperatures have already taken place, said Romanello. She gave the example of traditional, cooling adobe-style buildings of her native Argentina, compared to buildings in the United Kingdom which are “ill prepared” for hotter weather. Other potential solutions include improved urban planning featuring green spaces.
“We should not be learning from the U.S. where each building has an air conditioning unit,” she added.