Living with Extreme Heat: Our Shared Future
Extreme heat is a climate driven crisis. Around the world, heatwaves threaten public health at a time when the compounding factors of homelessness, drug abuse, obesity, and poverty are on the rise. They endanger global food security, reducing the productivity of crops and livestock, and risking the health and safety of the labor that tends them. They also pose an acute threat to cities, where the built environment amplifies temperatures, creating islands of heat stress. Believed to be the deadliest of all natural disasters, heatwaves demand concerted, creative, and complex policy responses.
To arm decision-makers with the information they need to protect lives and livelihoods from extreme heat, Perry World House convened its 2023 Global Shifts Colloquium, “Living with Extreme Heat: Our Shared Future.” The meeting brought together a multidisciplinary cohort of experts – medical doctors, urban planners, veterinarians, sitting and former mayors, engineers, and architects, among them – to investigate this challenge and advance measures to address it.
The colloquium report—accompanied by thought pieces written by the experts in attendance—offers a mosaic of ideas that policymakers can use to prepare for and cope with the heatwaves of today and tomorrow.