Global Nation reposted this
Director, Global Nation; Senior Advisor: Gates & Rockefeller Foundations; Senior Fellow: LSE; Author: The Responsible Globalist
Global Nation has been asked to support the UN System to respond to UN Secretary General António Guterres’s Call to Action on Extreme Heat. As a kick off to this one-year project, involving strategy, convening, governance design and communications, Cara Lew and I joined a 3-day global meeting last week in Geneva, bringing together a wide range of ministries from 12 countries, alongside 20 international organisations. We learned a lot from the many experts in the room, not least Joy Shumake-Guillemot, DrPH, Marc Gordon, Ashley Ward, Juli Trtanj, Nick Jones, Alejandro Saez Reale, Hunter Jones, Safi Ahsan Rizvi, Camille RENOUX, Agostinho Sousa, Elizabeth Fuller and others. Thanks Nick for sharing these photos, and insights!
So much technical expertise and political will on display at the Extreme Heat Risk Reduction workshop in Geneva this week, convened so ably by the WMO, UNDRR and the Global Heat Health Information Network. This field is advancing quickly! Four takeaways: 1. India, Brazil and Senegal are just three of the developing and emerging economies that are innovating quickly and showcasing models that others can learn from: such as an impressive health-centered early warning system in Senegal and Brazil’s worker safety measures - including an impressive tool (WBGT Monitor) that informs farmers of conditions when heavy outdoor work becomes unsafe. 2. There is a ton to learn from the individual & distinctive models that the UK, France, USA and Japan use to reduce health, economic and infrastructure losses from extreme heat episodes. The WHO recently estimated that 98,000 lives could be saved annually if 57 countries that lack heat early warning systems scale them up; capturing lessons from the 20+ year journeys that these four countries have been through to develop the sophisticated alerting and protection processes they have today will help others move down this path quicker. 3. Heat resilience requires expertise. Policies to save lives during heatwaves are more effective when epidemiologists have helped design them. Sarah B. Henderson, PhD shared British Columbia’s response to the devastating 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, providing an excellent template for how public health data can pinpoint the groups most at risk and steer efforts to protect them. 4. Heat resilience doesn’t come for free. Ladd Keith noted that more than 10,000 full-time flood plain managers are employed in the USA but only a handful of people working on reducing harm from extreme heat. This is rapidly changing, as exemplified by new posts like Arizona’s full time cooling centres coordinator. Abhiyant Tiwari described how India’s first generation of Heat Action Plans were developed without formal budget lines but investment and staffing needs are increasingly being identified up-front. It was great to see work of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR)’s City Resilience Program highlighted by our colleague Innocent Mbokodo from the South African Weather Service who described how a heat action Working Group established after our recent study tour to India is powering ahead. Last thought: there were some unsung heroes in the room. Temperatures in England exceeded 40C for the first time in July 2022, but the Adverse Weather Alerting System helped underpin an impressive mobilization of government and voluntary sector actors to minimize the harm. Mortality figures came in some 800-1000 excess deaths lower than models would have predicted for an event of this severity. A possible candidate for the next round of the Averted Disaster Award - and a model for other countries to learn from.