It’s Getting Hot in Here: Let’s Talk City Sunscreen & the Arsht-Rock Foundation

6 min readMar 5, 2024

On the back of a historic winter heat wave in the US, where temperatures in Madison Wisconsin reached 70 degrees in February, I want to discuss an area of climate adaption that doesn’t get talked about enough: heatwaves in cities. “Extreme heat is now the deadliest weather event in my country,” said US climate envoy John Kerry recently. However, for some reason hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters catalyzed by climate change get substantially more attention. This may be because heatwaves have less marketable imagery than wildfire or because it is less astoiding than a hurricane with viscous winds. It is my hope to shed light on this weather event that by 2050 will effect more than 3.5bn people worldwide and the one foundation I know of doing something about it.

As the world warms and more people live in urban settings, having measures and detailed plans for how to avoid catastrophic loss from worsening and more frequent heat waves can save lives. I’ve come to find that the the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (“Arsht-Rock”) is building out these capabilities.

The Arsht-Rock foundation “Develops and delivers resilience solutions to here-and-now climate risks through partnerships between our team of cross-disciplinary experts, global network of partners, and policymakers at all levels. Together, we enable individuals, communities, and institutions to prepare for, navigate, and recover from natural and human-caused shocks and stresses, both expected and those not yet imagined.” Luckily for the world, one of their main initiatives is around extreme heat! And here is what they are doing about it:

Targeted communications and warning systems, and actionable strategies
Developing tools that cities around the globe can use to message risks and solutions to heat to their constituents or fellow citizens. This includes naming heat waves.
Mobilizing experts, lawmakers, and stakeholders to accelerate implementation
Arsht-Rock has created the extreme heat resilience alliance (“EHRA”) that will connect local, regional, and national leaders to share insights and create policy that will help people become more heat resilient with a focus on the most vulnerable populations.
Building evidence
Like any ecosystem builder, you must be able to tell a story with data to convince others. Arsht-Rock is doing this by working with experts to quantify economic and social consequences of extreme heat in cities.
Creating conditions for resilience to scale
Arsht-Rock is developing tools, evaluation methods, and finance and insurance approaches that make heat solutions implementable at scale.
Creating and funding a new position called “Chief Heat Officers”
Supported by Arsht-Rock and EHRA, Chief Heat Officers are tasked with unifying their city governments’ responses to extreme heat. To date, there are 8 CHOs around the world.

As someone who is afraid of the impacts that heat will bring to cities and communities, this foundations work brings me some relief. The spatial scale with which Arsht-Rock is implementing change is what most excites me, because the ability to share knowledge, best practices, and solutions easily across the globe will fuel the acceleration of the adaptation, hopefully to a pace that saves lives.

Isaac Eskind, Impact Analyst

In May 2023, the first chief heat officer of a city in Asia was appointed; Bushra Afreen was hired for the position in Dhaka Bangladesh. As stated in the press release “North Dhaka is particularly vulnerable to the urban heat island effect due to its densely populated urban core, with hotspots in the city more than 10°C higher than the surrounding countryside. These extreme heat conditions are threatening lives and causing labor productivity losses greater than 8 percent of the city’s annual output. With the number of dangerously hot days estimated to double by 2050, the impacts of extreme heat will grow exponentially — with a greater burden falling on women and girls.”

World Weather Attribution is an organization that connects weather events to climate change. Specifically, they look to “understand how climate change influences the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events.” To date, they have performed over 50 studies. Here is a link to their study about the deadly heatwave in southeast Asia in 2023.

If you want to hear more about this topic, episode 38 on the podcast Zero by Akshat Rathi interviews Eleni Myrivili, the Global Chief Heat Officer to the UN.

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