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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Eleni](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Eleni-Myrivili_global-chief-heat-officer_Atlantic-Council.jpg\")
<\/div>Why do you think people have woken up to the threat of extreme heat?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
I think there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a CATCH story<\/p>
This story is part of Dialogue Earth’s work on the Community Adaptations to City Heat (CATCH) project, in partnership with Boston University. The project is funded by Wellcome. All Dialogue Earth content is editorially independent.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
In the last three years, the summers of 2022 to 2024<\/a>, we have been seeing extraordinary events around the world: long periods of heat together with drought, with wildfires. And more and more we\u2019ve been hearing about extraordinary numbers<\/a> of people losing their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jane Gilbert became the world\u2019s first chief heat officer when she was appointed to the role in Miami-Dade county in Florida in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea was an initiative of the Miami-Dade mayor and the director of what is now called the Climate Resilience Center of the Atlantic Council. Gilbert was soon followed by Eleni Myrivili in Athens, Greece, and Eugenia Kargbo in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In 2022 Myrivili moved from being Athens\u2019s chief heat officer to the role of global chief heat officer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chief Heat Officers<\/a> are tasked with raising awareness of the risks of extreme heat and its solutions; identifying areas that are particularly vulnerable; working to improve responses to heat; and working on risk-reduction and cooling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are currently seven chief heat officers around the world:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Jane Gilbert \u2013 chief heat officer, Miami-Dade County, Florida<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Eleni Myrivili \u2013 global chief heat officer, UN Habitat & Arsht-Rock<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Eugenia Kargbo \u2013 chief heat officer, Freetown, Sierra Leone<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Elissavet Bargianni \u2013 chief heat officer, Athens, Greece<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Krista Milne and Tiffany Crawford \u2013 chief heat officers, Melbourne, Australia<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u25cf Krista Milne and Tiffany Crawford \u2013 chief heat officers, Melbourne, Australia<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n So there are three basic pillars: awareness, preparedness and redesign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re going to have extreme heat coming back with a vengeance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t have a lot of money in cities usually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 that\u2019s really super important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we\u2019re 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: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna have heat\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t need to have people die from heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> than doing grey infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it\u2019s still difficult, because people know how to build things with grey infrastructure, and they know how to make money out of them. It\u2019s harder to design and to procure things that are not based on cement. So often it\u2019s not the funding, but it\u2019s the knowledge and the capacity and changing the logic and the culture within governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of things that one city does can inspire another city, and a city can see that they\u2019re possible to do. But of course, you have to make it very specific to the local conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, all these cities in Northern Europe have limited to a large extent<\/a> 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\u2019s created amazing knowledge<\/a> and implemented incredible initiatives in relation to extreme heat. We can get inspired, and we can see what works and what doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most important messages is the importance of cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2015 COP in Paris was the first time that cities came together and said: \u201cWe\u2019re here, and we think we\u2019re a very important player in climate change and anything that happens, either in mitigation or adaptation, we\u2019re the ones that are actually doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the last four COPs, we\u2019ve seen cities being increasingly more present, more part of the panels, more part of the discussions about funding, about solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eleni Myrivili talks to Dialogue Earth about how chief heat officers are helping cities stay cool and city dwellers stay healthy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4104,"featured_media":60092334,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[761],"tags":[543,50041595,551,50042413],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-60092319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate","tag-extreme-weather","tag-global-heating","tag-health","tag-heat-adaptation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat do chief heat officers actually do?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What makes someone a good chief heat officer?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
From your time in that role at Athens, are there any particular initiatives that you would cite as examples of that?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"elderly](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Athens-heatwave_Alamy_3BP63D0-scaled.jpg\")
<\/div>How can we make cities more resistant to this heat in the first place? Will it be expensive?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
And how much can knowledge be transferred between very different cities?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"people](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/20240917_levels-vegetation_Changi-Airport-Singapore_Michael-Coghlan_Flicr-54120666756.jpg\")
<\/div>Ahead of the COP30 climate meeting in Brazil, what message would you send to world leaders?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n