On a sunny and already sweltering afternoon in early May, 14 representatives from various public and non-profit organizations gathered in a suburban Phoenix cooling centre to launch a concerted effort to forestall a repeat of the calamity of the summer of 2023. Last summer, more than 900 Arizonans died, and thousands more were hospitalized, during a record-breaking heat wave during which temperatures topped 43°C for weeks on end.
The participants included municipal, county, state and federal officials, leaders of local faith groups, meteorologists and even someone from an Arizona tourism promotion department. But the first speaker, a veteran public health epidemiologist named Eugene Livar, bore a novel title that seemed intended to signal a seriousness of purpose in the fight to come. Earlier in the year, Governor Katie Hobbs had appointed Livar to serve as Arizona’s first “chief heat officer.” The move was part of Hobbs’s far-ranging extreme-heat preparedness strategy, which she unveiled in March. It marked the first time that Arizona would be pressing ahead with an emergency response that, as Livar pointed out, “needs buy-in from all levels of communities across our state.”
Livar is a member of a small but growing fraternity of chief heat officers (CHOs) around the globe that have been appointed with much fanfare in the last few years. There are CHOs in municipalities like Miami-Dade County, Phoenix, Athens, Dhaka North in Bangladesh, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Melbourne, Australia.
It’s not difficult to understand why. Every year, thermometers are reaching stifling new heights: 48.8°C in parts of Europe in 2021, Australia cracked 50.7°C in 2022, China breached 52.2°C in 2023, with new records already being set in 2024. Heat has closed tourist attractions in Greece, schools in Bangladesh and has already cost the global economy trillions in human health, productivity, and agricultural output since the 1990s, according to a study from Dartmouth University. Combined with drought conditions, heat domes have helped amplify massive wildfires that tore through California, northern Canada and large swaths of southern Europe. In 2021, the tiny community of Lytton, B.C., went completely up in flames after it became trapped under a heat dome featuring 50°C temperatures.
Thanks to the rising crescendo of emergencies, public health officials have begun to focus more of their efforts on confronting what has become an annual season of “global boiling,” as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres famously said last July. The question is whether the appointment of CHOs will prove to be more, well, resilient and effective in terms of confronting a deeply thorny climate crisis.
The lethal consequences of heat waves and the urban heat-island effect aren’t a new phenomenon. In July 1995, the brutal combination of an extreme heat wave and widespread power outages killed more than 500 people in Chicago, many of them elderly residents of public housing, who died in apartments that had become furnace-like cells from which they were too afraid to venture because of the risk of violence.
But deadly heat waves are becoming more frequent. Extreme heat is now by far the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States, according to the National Weather Service, giving heat the moniker of being the “silent killer” of climate change. Over the past decade, heat waves in Europe and Asia have claimed tens of thousands of lives. And, of course, the impact of extreme heat is nowhere more ferocious than in the poorest and most exposed regions of the world, where electricity, much less air conditioning, is scarce.
Three years ago, I never envisioned that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.
- Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation, City of Phoenix
The appointment of heat officers around the globe is largely the result of a project by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and the Atlantic Council, a think tank. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in promoting resilience, a malleable but trendy goal, for some years. In 2013, it endowed a fund to mark its centennial that would enable municipalities around the world to provide funds to hire 100 “chief resilience officers,” or CROs.
The foundation discontinued its resilient cities program in 2019, pivoting to the more focused concept of installing heat czars. (Many cities that signed on to the earlier initiative subsequently got rid of their CROs.) Some of the new CHOs, however, had served as CROs. UN-Habitat recently hired a resilience official from Greece, Eleni Myrivili, who had previously served as the CRO of Athens. She’s now the UN’s first CHO.
Unlike resilience, an indistinct concept, extreme heat as a policy challenge has the virtue of being highly specific. There’s a broad consensus on how cities should equitably confront extreme heat, both in the short term and the longer term, and on what not to do, in terms of exacerbating the crisis by failing to act.
Major science and health journals such as Nature and The Lancet regularly publish policy-minded scholarship about the health risks of extreme heat – including cardiovascular, cognitive and kidney failure – and the effectiveness of a wide array of cooling techniques. Public health officials are also paying much more attention: to the plight of people working outdoors, as well as lower-income households and the homeless – all groups that bear the brunt of extreme heat.
Municipalities have expanded access to respite services such as cooling centres as a short-term measure. Planning and design experts, meanwhile, have laid out a menu of longer-term solutions – everything from extensive tree planting to the deployment of shade structures to the use of materials that deflect heat. Indeed, a World Economic Forum modelling study published last year estimated that if the typical European city enlarged its tree canopy from the average 14% coverage to about 30%, that move alone would reduce heat-related deaths by a third.
Yet even, or perhaps especially, the hottest cities do all sorts of things that conflict with the goal of mitigating the impact of extreme heat – approving commercial developments with large surface parking lots or building new highways. The consumer market for air conditioners offers a vivid example of the inherent contradictions: AC, from a health perspective, is the most effective way of countering the physiological symptoms of extreme heat. Some jurisdictions, such as Ontario, have been debating whether access to air conditioning is a human right. But surging AC use also places extreme pressures on local electricity grids, triggering brownouts that may inflict the harshest conditions on marginalized communities.
A study published in 2022 by the Journal of the American Planning Association shows there’s still considerable ambiguity about who, exactly, should resolve these conflicts and coordinate the response. “Although more heat governance is needed, it is unclear who bears primary responsibility,” the authors noted. The study surveyed planners in 69 cities and found no consensus about which level of government or which department should steer and coordinate public sector response. “These findings suggest that if heat strategies are not coordinated across the full network of plans, policies are likely to be at cross purposes and lead to undesired or inequitable outcomes.”
Soon after Jane Gilbert was appointed to serve as Miami-Dade County’s chief heat officer in 2021, the first such post to be created in the United States, she embarked on preparing a comprehensive strategy for a sprawling region that experiences increasingly humid conditions in the summer months. “In the 14 years prior to 2023, we had an average of six days out of the year that reached at or above a heat index of 105 degrees,” Gilbert told NBC News earlier this year. “Last summer, we had over 42 days, so it was seven times higher than the average.”
Her plan, underwritten by Arsht-Rockefeller and released in late 2022, incorporates input from every level of government, the National Weather Service, business groups, non-profits and local universities. She also commissioned experts to carry out vulnerability mapping within the region.
“My role is different than some typical government jobs in that I work across departments and across sectors,” Gilbert, who is part of the county’s 25-person Office of Resilience, explained in a statement, adding that she is laser focused on extreme heat. “On any given day, I might be reviewing a new policy that could impact how we respond to or mitigate extreme heat. It could be updating our emergency management protocols, writing a grant with departments on tree planting, going out and speaking at a community event or conducting a training for some staff or community members.” Yet her resources are modest: she has a staff of two, a US$300,000 budget for heat season, and another $2.5 million for tree planting and other initiatives. (Miami-Dade declined a request for an interview with Gilbert.)
Dave Hondula, director of heat response and mitigation for the City of Phoenix, says his understanding of his role as CHO is to ensure both short-term emergency measures but also longer-term strategies “for cooling the city and making it more comfortable,” as he explained on The New York Times’s Daily podcast last year. He freely acknowledged how quickly the political conditions have changed. “Three years ago, I never envisioned – nobody envisioned – that anybody would be doing this job. The idea of a heat role in local government didn’t exist.”
What remains to be seen is whether CHOs can deliver the policy goods. UN-Habitat’s Myrivili acknowledged, during a panel discussion at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, that the complexities posed by extreme heat require the attention of multidisciplinary teams. But, she added, “finding new ways of financing [is] crucial.” After all, it’s one thing to add some money to an emergency services budget to set up more cooling centres during the hot months. But retrofitting an urban area with reflective roofs, better transit, much more greenery, purpose-built shade structures and dwellings that don’t function like convection ovens in the summer months is quite another.
I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes to actually change anything.
- Zack Taylor, Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance
As Melbourne co-CHO Tiffany Crawford says, “I think that the scale of the transition that’s required around nature-based solutions and adaptation is monumental.”
Can one office, tasked with a daunting mandate, muster the resources and the bureaucratic heft to get all the players to row in the same direction? “From a governance perspective, I wonder about where it will fit into the organization,” says Zack Taylor, founder of Western University’s Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance. “Where would you put it? Planning? Building? Or as a ‘central agency’ function within the CAO/city manager’s office? Ultimately,” he says, “I am worried about a lot of smoke and light around a ‘heat czar’ that is not sufficiently wired into established processes and procedures to actually change anything.”
It’s worth pointing out that a growing number of cities, as well as state governments, around the world have been hustling to put in place a wide range of policies and programs in response to extreme heat, including many that don’t involve chief heat officers. Some are comprehensive – New York State’s detailed action plan is fairly typical for big cities these days – while others leave much to be desired, such as a widely ridiculed effort by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to install tiny shade structures at bus stops.
Yet substantive reforms have surfaced in cities with CHOs: Phoenix city council this past April enacted a regulation requiring airport authorities and construction companies to establish heat-protection plans for their workers, a move that is expected to affect 10,000 people. Miami-Dade, in turn, this year increased budgets within public housing, transportation and community action departments for improved weatherization services, installation of energy-efficient AC systems, and installation of bus shelters in urban heat islands.
For all that, countless municipalities – in sun belts as well as more temperate climates where communities aren’t prepared for brutal heat – will need to come to grips with the fact that this kind of climate-related threat challenges so many of the business-as-usual approaches to city building and urban design. Half-hearted or for-show greening efforts must be abandoned in favour of truly effective strategies. We’ll have to break our addiction to impermeable asphalt or concrete surfaces. Architects and developers must find alternatives to air conditioning as the default way of cooling buildings, using time-tested techniques such as better cross-ventilation, tactical use of building materials with passive cooling features (e.g., concrete floors) and the deployment of heat pumps as more energy-efficient alternatives to AC.
There’s no doubt CHOs can play a role in this transition, both in terms of ensuring that disparate bureaucracies are not working at cross purposes as well as communicating with the wider public. But cities and regions that truly recognize the value of these positions will move quickly to wean themselves off the philanthropic funding, institutionalize their CHOs, and then give these officials the regulatory and budgetary clout they’ll need to do the job properly.
“Being the chief heat officer in a place like Phoenix means coming up with great ideas and realizing they’re very hard to pull off within the rules and realities of a city government,” Hondula told The Times. “I would argue it means being a little persistent and being willing to try to ruffle some feathers a little bit. But through those experiences, we’ve generated a little saying among our team: ‘The heat office wasn’t created to maintain the status quo.’”Which is certainly encouraging, because the climate emergency demands far more than business-as-usual.
John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.
Illustration by Ryan Garcia
