Threats posed by rising temperatures will form the crux of discussions as two of the world’s biggest aid agencies are set to host an inaugural global summit on extreme heat on Thursday.
This is even as directors have warned that the climate crisis is dramatically increasing the probability of a mass-fatality heat disaster.
A recent study in the Lancet showed that the death toll from heat-related illnesses is forecast to soar more than fourfold by midcentury if temperatures rise by 2C. A separate study predicted that China alone is on track to see between 20,000 and 80,000 heatwave deaths a year.
Among other things, the conference is expected to highlight some of the pioneering work being done, from tree-planting projects to the development of reflective roof coverings that reduce indoor temperatures.
After last year’s record-shattering temperatures, when 3.8 billion people – half the world’s population – sweltered in extreme heat for at least one day, the organisers hope the event will prompt governments to prepare for a “silent killer” that rarely gets the attention it deserves when compared with hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) have come together to stage this virtual conference, in which they will urge national governments, local authorities, humanitarian groups, companies, school and hospitals to develop heat action plans.
They are expected to float the idea of naming heatwaves in the same way that typhoons or hurricanes are labelled to make them more prominent.
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Jagan Chapagain, who is the IFRC secretary general, drew comparisons to Kim Stanley Robinson’s apocalyptic novel Ministry for the Future, which opens with a deadly heatwave in India that kills millions of people, some of whom are poached alive in a lake they hoped to cool off in.
“It is, for now, science fiction,” he said. “We’re not there, yet. But extreme heat, far less visually dramatic than hurricanes or floods, is claiming lives and livelihoods with a stealth which belies its impact. Climate change is dramatically increasing the probability that we will see a mass-fatality extreme heat disaster soon.”
Chapagan said that heat was already a major cause of suffering in many parts of the world. In the US it accounts for more deaths than all other climate impacts put together, but this often goes unreported because it is usually less sudden, less visual, than events such as hurricanes, and the scale of fatalities can take months or years to calculate.
These types of disaster are starting to appear on the IFRC radar. The organisation’s 40-year-old Disaster Response Emergency Fund received its first appeal for a heatwave in 2018, from North Korea. The next came in 2021 from Vietnam, then two the following year (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), followed by three last year (Greece, Bangladesh and Kyrgyzstan). In that period, the amount the fund provided to heatwave appeals rose more than fivefold.
While the sums are still relatively small compared with more traditional humanitarian responses for earthquakes and cyclone disasters, heatwave risks are projected to increase rapidly in the coming decades.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
