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 policymakers 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.
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.
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.
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 per cent 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.
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.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.