stories
Extreme heat affects people's health and livelihood, especially women and vulnerable communities. These stories highlight the human side of climate resilience, featuring stories of courage, innovation, and collective action against extreme heat.
​February, 2025 — In developing and beginning to put into place its pioneering extreme heat plan, Freetown - the capital of Sierra Leone - drew heavily on a too-often underutilised resource: its own residents.
​February, 2025 — For years, parents taking their infants out in baby carriages or prams in Australia’s hot weather have tried to keep them cool by draping a light piece of shade fabric over the top.
January, 2025 — From shuttered classrooms around the world to Saudi Arabia’s brutal death toll from heat during The Hajj, worsening temperature extremes in 2024 brought serious impacts, costs, and challenges for millions of people.
December, 2024 — Could working-age adults be at higher risk of extreme heat than previously thought?
Scientific studies have long shown that extreme heat claims a disproportionate share of lives among the elderly and very young children. But a new report, based in 20 years of mortality and weather data from across Mexico, shows an unexpectedly high rate of deaths among 18 to 35 year olds.
September, 2025 — The accelerating effect of extreme heat is now the biggest killer among climate extreme events. But the scale and seriousness of the threat is hard to portray visually, not least because heat is largely invisible - unlike other climate extremes such as floods and storms - and because many of those suffering its impact do so indoors, out of the public eye.
July, 2024 — In July 2022, London experienced a temperature shock: two days of unprecedented 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) heat that buckled rail lines, put pressure on hospitals and the ambulances, overwhelmed air conditioning systems and gave the London Fire Brigade its busiest day since World War II, in part fighting home-destroying wildfires near the city’s outskirts.