Q&A: ‘We don’t need to have people die from heat’

Heatwaves have swept across the northern hemisphere this summer as they did last summer and will again the next.

Warnings of deaths and the likelihood of worse to come due to climate change are as inescapable as the heat.

But this focus on the impact of extreme heat on health is relatively new. And while the heat itself may be unwelcome, the attention finally being paid to a huge and growing issue is a victory for those who have spent years fighting the problem.

One of those people is Eleni Myrivili, the global chief heat officer at both the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rock Resilience Center.

She spoke to Dialogue Earth about how cities can keep people healthy as heat keeps rising. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Eleni Myrivili is the global chief heat officer at both the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rock Resilience Center (Image: Atlantic Council)

Why do you think people have woken up to the threat of extreme heat?

I think there’s been an incredible shift in awareness in the last three or four years. When I started working on this, which was the end of the previous decade, there were very, very few people that realised how dangerous heat is for our health.

In the last three years, the summers of 2022 to 2024, we have been seeing extraordinary events around the world: long periods of heat together with drought, with wildfires. And more and more we’ve been hearing about extraordinary numbers of people losing their lives.

We started calling heat the silent killer, because it was really difficult to talk about it and to actually represent it. Somehow people in the media started finding the ways and the types of narratives to talk about it.

And finally, it was the chief heat officers. The fact that they personalised this role, personalised the need for creating policies that can help people survive these types of temperatures, I think that was really important.

What do chief heat officers actually do?

So there are three basic pillars: awareness, preparedness and redesign.

Most [chief heat officers] were already working in city administrations and had jobs related to climate departments. In one way or another they had the mandate to actually figure out how, first of all, to protect the most vulnerable populations of the city. And, second, how to make the city cooler and ready for the next decades, where we’re going to have extreme heat coming back with a vengeance.

Another big part of it is awareness raising and advocacy, translating meaningful science and scientific knowledge for policy makers and communities. You might need to persuade a mayor to do something. Or you might need to inform senior citizens about the danger they are facing and what kind of behavioural changes to make to be safer.

What makes someone a good chief heat officer?

You have to be very flexible, and you have to be able to think on your feet. To understand how to advise the mayor and the city council, so that the types of initiatives that are prioritised are the ones that actually protect the most exposed and vulnerable. But also to know what initiatives get you the most bang for your buck, because we don’t have a lot of money in cities usually.

From your time in that role at Athens, are there any particular initiatives that you would cite as examples of that?

One of the most important things we did in Athens was the categorisation of heatwaves. Before, they announced if we had a heatwave, or we were expecting a heatwave. But actually having a categorisation of extreme heat – that’s really super important.

Heatwaves like the one that struck Athens this July are especially dangerous for the elderly. An algorithm linking heat and mortality into categories of risk has been created to help policymakers in the city (Image: Nicolas Koutsokostas / Imago / Alamy)

What we did was create a specific algorithm for Athens. This algorithm depicts the relationship between heat and mortality based on two decades of data. We created categories of risk: yellow, orange and red.

If we’re at orange, there is a possibility of up to 20% more mortality among our population. This sounds to policy makers much more significant than just telling them: “We’re gonna have heat”.

The idea is to create these categories and link them to specific early-warning systems, to specific policies. Do we shut down things when things start getting really hot. Do we send workers home? Do we close down events? If we manage to get to people early enough, either with good information or with people that can help them, we don’t need to have people die from heat.

How can we make cities more resistant to this heat in the first place? Will it be expensive?

If we start using nature more cleverly within cities, we can actually save money. And if we think of the co-benefits these bring to us, they end up being significantly cheaper than doing grey infrastructure.

But it’s still difficult, because people know how to build things with grey infrastructure, and they know how to make money out of them. It’s harder to design and to procure things that are not based on cement. So often it’s not the funding, but it’s the knowledge and the capacity and changing the logic and the culture within governments.

The other part of it is that there is not enough money in the public sector to do all this on its own. We have to get the private sector more involved in helping redesign our cities. A lot of people are working on financing adaptation and resilience in cities. So there are really clever people putting their brains together to figure out how to solve this.

And how much can knowledge be transferred between very different cities?

A lot of things that one city does can inspire another city, and a city can see that they’re possible to do. But of course, you have to make it very specific to the local conditions.

For example, all these cities in Northern Europe have limited to a large extent the dominance of the private car in their public spaces. And this is something that we still are struggling with in South Europe. But the fact that it has been done is an important reminder and an important vision for other cities. Or Singapore: it’s created amazing knowledge and implemented incredible initiatives in relation to extreme heat. We can get inspired, and we can see what works and what doesn’t work.

Singapore has implemented multiple initiatives to tackle urban heat, such as green roofs, walls and façades. Other cities could get inspired and see what works and what doesn’t work, says global chief heat officer Eleni Myrivili (Image: Michael Coghlan / Flickr, CC BY SA)

Ahead of the COP30 climate meeting in Brazil, what message would you send to world leaders?

One of the most important messages is the importance of cities.

The 2015 COP in Paris was the first time that cities came together and said: “We’re here, and we think we’re a very important player in climate change and anything that happens, either in mitigation or adaptation, we’re the ones that are actually doing it.”

In the last four COPs, we’ve seen cities being increasingly more present, more part of the panels, more part of the discussions about funding, about solutions.

This is a really significant point: the importance of cities in decisions that are made about climate policy and climate financing is super, super crucial at this COP. One of the most important messages is the importance of cities.