European heatwaves: How bad will they get? | DW News

June was a sweltering month here in Germany and not just here, it was the hottest June ever recorded in Western Europe. That's according to a new report by Copernicus, the EU's climate monitor. Globally, the study found it to be the second hottest June on record. Another heat wave is currently sweeping across parts of Europe and governments are under increasing pressure to A wake-up call for Europe. A new report by the EU's climate monitor, Copernicus, says that last month was the hottest June ever recorded in Western Europe. The average temperature reached 20.4 degrees Celsius, more than three degrees Celsius above the norm. Globally, it was the hottest June on record. And last month, sea temperatures worldwide reached their highest since records began. Global Witness, a non-profit, says two-thirds of the EU's population may have been exposed to harmful levels of ozone pollution during the June heat wave. Europe is the world's fastest warming continent. Scientists say the extreme temperatures would have been virtually impossible without climate change. Countries including France and Schools were shut and transport was disrupted. EU lawmakers in Strasbourg called for a stronger, united response. Preparation can no longer be an emergency policy. It must be an element carried out every day, a policy of anticipation carried out by each citizen, each company, each one of us. It is fair to recognize that the EU has advanced, but let us be clear, it is no longer enough. Europe has to stop acting when the country is exhausted. It has to act before that. The World Health Organization has warned June's heat wave was a dress rehearsal and is urging all nations to adopt heat health action plans. Cathy Boffman-McLeod is the founder and CEO of Heat Resilience Action and one of the leading voices on extreme heat and its consequences, particularly on vulnerable communities. Cathy, welcome to the show. Now, Europe has seen three extreme heat waves this year, and it's only early July. What concerns you most right now? Life and death. This is a life and death situation. Europe is heating more quickly than other continents. 50,000 dead from heat in summers past, 63,000 two summers ago. Vulnerable communities, seniors and addicts, children, pregnant women, women and men working outside with very few labor protections. And people do not understand how deadly heat is. It's silent, it's invisible, and it's killing more people than any other climate hazard. And oftentimes, all of them combined, floods, fires, hurricanes, all of it combined. And it is advancing and we've just got to get ready. The heat is most severely felt in urban areas. How do heat waves affect cities specifically? Cities, the way that we have built our cities, especially in Europe, are holding heat. They're meant to hold heat because it's been cold. What we are seeing is that those buildings are holding heat and emanating that heat at night. And it's called the urban heat island effect. And cities are hotter. Nighttime temperatures are hotter. So the highs and the lows at night, which really matters to our health, getting sleep at night is really important. And so the cities are places where heat is showing up the worst and really preying on people day and night. What are the biggest mistakes, more specifically speaking, we've made in urban environments? Well, we're building with cement, we're building with steel and glass and black surfaces, asphalt, particularly holds heat, metal holds heat. And again, emanates that all through the night. And so we have gone away from some of the natural materials, clay and some of the ways that in our ancestors made their homes. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. But now the fit, the retrofit is air conditioning and air conditioning is really bad for the climate and for the environment. And it's expensive for people. And so we've got a real conundrum in the cities. But luckily, there are all sorts of solutions that can help protect lives and jobs and communities. And nature is one of the biggest solutions. But cities are the place where the risk is the highest and the biggest opportunity for those solutions. I want to look at the long term effects in a second. But first, let's look at the short term, because the next heat wave is already around the corner. How can we protect our urban populations from the heat right now? The best thing is for people to know about it. And what we find is that even when the government has good early warning systems, they're not reaching everyone. And so the best thing is to know about it, to know what to do about it. So to have some good actionable advice, stay cool. How do you do that? You need to do that with airflow. You need to do that with the clothes you wear. You need to do that by arranging your work hours so that you're not overly exposed to heat. You've got to stay hydrated. You need to know the signs of your own body showing stress from heat. That is feeling nauseous, you know, you stop sweating, you have muscle cramps, you feel faint, all of those things are signs. And know who is most vulnerable, your grandparents, your children, and even your pets. And so thinking about staying cool, is there a cooling center? Is there somewhere where you can get cool? That's really important. Why are women, for example, more affected by the heat than men? Women are disproportionately impacted by heat. One, physiologically. Two, and physiologically meaning that our sweat rates are lower than men and because of hormonal fluctuations, pregnancy, menstruation, menopause, our temperature and thermoregulation is different. And so there's the physiological disproportionate impact. And then there's the socioeconomic. Women are doing unpaid free care for family members at immense higher rates than men. And that means they're not getting paid to do that unpaid care. And it takes them out of the economy. They are over hot stoves in hot kitchens. They are responsible for all the food preparation. And they're at night when it's hot, taking care of kids. Kids get hot and sweaty. They get in bed with moms. Nobody's sleeping. Everybody wakes up feeling sick and slow. School doesn't go well. And women are slowed down and still have to take care of everyone else. It's like a double punch in the face. You have to take care of everyone else and you feel sick yourself, disproportionately so. And so this has 772 million women who are informally employed facing extreme heat in the world. And so when we think about solutions, we want to focus on women-centered solutions, understanding disaggregated data. So how are women receiving early warnings for heat? In which trusted channel of information are they getting it? And do they have the capacity to do what is being asked of them? And that's really important. And one of the things you ask about urban action is that the communities and the cities, they need to be in touch with people who are most at risk early and even go door-to-door to communities where you know people are living in hot, low-income communities where people can't get out and don't have a place to go. Got to check with them. Yeah, that includes the elderly, of course. In the past heat wave here in Germany, thousands of people died, around 5,000, and most of them were over the age of 75. What makes the heat so dangerous for the elderly? Some of that is their socioeconomic status. A lot of times those are fixed income seniors who are not going to run the air conditioning if they have it, don't have air conditioning, living in lower rent apartments which are, you know, up in the attics that are really hot. They are often, they have underlying conditions, you know, the heat is really hard on the human heart. And so if you have an underlying heart condition, you are much more susceptible to extreme heat. And so, you know, in Europe specifically watching those numbers of seniors, but it is consistent in other communities also where seniors are dying at higher rates than other age groups. And then there's unhoused people, of course, people who have nowhere to go. What can be done to help them to escape the heat? Well, that takes all kinds of community action in advance to provide the opportunity for people to come inside where it's cool. And one of the things that worked for schools in London during the big heat wave 10 days ago or two weeks ago was that schools had one or two cooled spaces, not the classrooms. And so they were rotating kids in and out of the cooled space. And that's what the human body needs is to, we can only be exposed to that heat for a certain amount of time and then need to be cooled. And so using those cooled spaces is really important. And so having people who are living outside and living on the streets have an opportunity to get cool is really important and to stay hydrated. And oftentimes, you know, water, you need to consume it, but also wetting your clothes with water. So the air flows over can really be effective in cooling your body temperature. Yeah. Outdoor work is very common, even under, you know, severe heat construction sites, delivery and farm workers, everything to kind of keep our society going. What protections should employers have in place to protect the people who work for them under these circumstances? Again, awareness and heat literacy is so important. And so if you're managing a team of people working outside, you need to know, is there anyone on your team who is disproportionately at risk because of a medication they take or because of a medical condition? Do you know how long they can work before they begin to show signs of heat illness? And where do they take a break? And are there uniforms or what they wear? Can that be changed to add more cooling clothing? Is there a cooling vest that they can wear? And those are more and more prominent in people working outside, you know, law enforcement officers, people like that. You have a vest you can wear under your clothes that cools your body. And so, again, the hours they work, can you start earlier, making sure people are hydrated, knowing who's disproportionately impacted and then watching for the signs, like really knowing when they see someone who looks like they're suffering from heat, because often it comes up on a person they don't even know that it's happening. And all of a sudden they've passed out and it becomes a life or death situation. So the other piece of this is an economic awareness of what it's costing companies in the fact that people are slowing down and making mistakes. And this also gets to the nighttime temperatures. If your workforce hasn't slept at all because it's so hot, they're coming to work tired. Their hand-eye coordination is diminished. They're making mistakes. They can hurt themselves and hurt others. And while this has human cost, it also costs companies money. And do those companies have the economic tools to quantify what that productivity loss is? And the answer right now is no, but we're getting there. And, you know, we just rolled out the city heat solutions calculator that helps people understand investing in these solutions like shade and early warnings and heat response plans, what that means, you know, economically for communities to save on productivity, but also protect life and health. Yeah. Experts agree that not enough is being done right now to address these issues. To what extent does the fact that traditionally marginalized communities are the most affected contribute to the lacking sense of urgency among political decision makers, you think? I mean, the sad thing is that when you have these big mass casualty events and you said 5,000 seniors died, who cares about these seniors? You know, I mean, these are people who are marginalized in our society. And so we will see these sorts of impacts coming to people beyond low-income communities. But the role that the politicians play and the leadership of the community, it will get bigger and the pressure will be greater for solutions and protection. I want to talk about long-term solutions. What really needs to happen to increase resilience for the urban population, to make our cities heat proof, future proof, to actually make them livable places and not have everyone swarm out of the city as, you know, as soon as the sun comes out, essentially. Yeah, the people who can afford to swarm out, which is exactly your point. Yes. So we need to invest in nature and green space in our cities. It is one of the most cost-effective ways to cool a city. It does take time. So long-term plans for nature-based solutions, green spaces, water features, shade. Shade is critical infrastructure. One of the biggest things that is threatening the US right now in a heat wave is that even though we have air conditioning, the grid will blackout. So we have these blackouts because of the demand on the systems for air conditioning. This also includes data centers that are demanding more power. And so we have data centers and then air conditioning, and then a blackout comes as a result. And so thinking about critical infrastructure for energy or healthcare in an urban system, but think about nature as one of those critical infrastructure categories. Also shade. Also thinking about changing the airflow in when we retrofit buildings. How do people get early warning systems? Long-term, we need to think about the financing. How are we going to create plenty of financing for a city to conduct and then implement a good heat action plan that takes into account all of the communities and prioritizes with the greatest vulnerability to heat. And then thinking about the economics of this, do we again know how much it costs to invest in this? And then what you get back in terms of avoided losses from productivity or from job losses. And then what do workers lose in these extreme heat events from their own pockets, which affects everyone. And of course, families are suffering too. Is there a way to end on a positive note here? Is there an example of best practices anywhere we should be looking for inspiration if we're rethinking our cities? Yes. So the city of Medellin did a huge tree planting in some major avenues in the city and dropped the city's average temperature by two or three degrees centigrade. The city of Paris pulled up the impermeable surface, the granite in the front of the city hall and is greening it. And that will reduce the temperature. So greening is one of the big success stories from cities. Others are India is because it's so hot, it is the birthplace of heat solution. So the first heat action plan was created in India and is being perfected and replicated. And there are 300 heat action plans in cities across the continent. Those heat action plans are really focused on most vulnerable places and scientifically understand where the hotspots are. And so there is immense hope and evidence that these solutions can work, but we've got to invest before, after and during these heat waves. Another solution that has shown early promise is naming heat waves, like we name hurricanes, basing that on a health-based ranking system. So you'd have a category three heat wave with a name. And we tested that in Spain, Heat Wave Zoe in 2022 and 2023, an official naming program to help bring the awareness to people. And what we found is that when it had a name, people prepared more, shared more with friends, family and colleagues, and took the government's advice on how to prepare for heat. And so that big marketing of a heat wave as a dangerous thing that you should pay attention to and do something about can be really effective and quickly. Many options there, Cathy Boffman-McLeod, CEO of HERA. Pleasure speaking to you today. Thank you so much. Thank you.