Image source: CORDIS.europa.eu
This article is an interview and blog post by Lily Raye (LR), a PhD student in the Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department at North Carolina State University. Lily is a 2022-2023 Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (SECASC) Global Change Fellow. Her research interests include historical extreme heat events in the Carolinas, health-related impacts of extreme heat, and risk management associated with climate change-induced hazards.
Max Cawley (MC) is the Director of Climate Research and Engagement for the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, North Carolina. He is an educator, researcher, evaluator, and science communicator with the Museum and focuses on participatory and responsible science through public engagement. In April 2023, Max shared his expertise as a panelist during a Global Change Fellows risk communication seminar, and he presented the Imagine Durham 2100 exhibit at the Museum of Life and Science. During both events, Max explained how extreme heat is impacting North Carolina, how different individuals perceive heat-related hazards, and some current mitigation strategies in place. This interview expands on these topics.
Links to the Global Change Fellows Risk Communication Seminar and the Imagine Durham 2100 exhibit website follow this article at the bottom of the page.
LR: Do you think the number of extreme heat events in North Carolina is increasing due to climate change? What about their severity?
MC: The first question feels easier to define than the second – but yes: we are more imperiled by heat than we were in the past in North Carolina. The excellent public-facing tool US Climate Resilience Toolkit helps to qualify this for me – we can see that under just about any way that you might measure it, we are more at-risk due to heat – more days over 90, 95, 100, 105 – rapidly increasing daily minimum temperatures, etc.
As far as severity – this feels a bit harder to qualify. Some extreme heat events are really acute – a day at 105 is obviously terrible for public health – but so are long periods of unrelenting heat, including at night time. I think it’s important for us to plan both for extremely hot days that “feel” dangerous to people – and for the more insidious heat events that creep up on us after multiple days lingering in the 90s.
LR: How do you think extreme heat is impacting North Carolina communities in different ways?
MC: Some communities are much more imperiled by extreme heat than others – the hazard and risk is not evenly or equitably distributed across North Carolina, or even across individual complex urban landscapes. People are imperiled by heat due to the climate event themselves, but the built environment in the places that they live and work also changes their susceptibility – if they live or work somewhere extremely exposed to heat, or whose landscape builds upon or holds onto the heat of the day, then their exposure is higher than those of the people who live in greener, more shaded neighborhoods.
LR: How do you think underserved communities are disproportionately affected by heat?
MC: Decisions led to inequitable distribution of heat risk – our cities were planned with inequitable investment in green spaces and decision-making about where to put less desirable urban assets like highways and parking lots – today, heat is an expression of those inequitable decision-making processes, and the people suffering under extreme heat are doing so as a consequence of those decisions.
People living in areas that are physically hotter are not only more at-risk to health conditions and complications due to heat, but also tend to have to spend a higher percentage of their income on cooling their homes – compounding the economic inequity of the situation. Furthermore, people are imperiled by heat via their social isolation – if they do not speak the same language fluently, if they have fewer social connections, if they are older and have fewer relatives around – all of these make someone’s risk during a heat event higher.
LR: When it comes to risk communication, do you think North Carolina citizens are aware of their own vulnerabilities to extreme heat?
MC: I don’t think we as risk communicators have done a sufficient job of helping North Carolinians to understand our risks posed by extreme heat. It is a challenging hazard to build salience and importance around for a few reasons – but centrally, heat is not new to Carolinians.
LR: How can we better communicate these risks?
MC: We have to do a better job of communicating the urgency and health risks posed by heat to people – but this needs to start before the summer season, and it can be easy to forget about heat until it is bearing down on us, at which time it can be too late. People need to understand that they and their loved ones are imperiled by heat when they’re working and when they’re at home, and their risk is compounded by inequity and vulnerability posed or imposed on them by their workplace, their employer, or their landlords – that the hazards posed by both extreme events and prolonged periods of lower-heat (high 80s, 90s, higher nighttime temps) are pieces of a mental model that need to be pieced together early and reinforced often.
LR: What are the greatest challenges when it comes to extreme heat mitigation? Is it funding, accessibility, or a mixture of both?
MC: Both. Funding is limited for the same reasons as above – it still isn’t broadly in the cultural zeitgeist as that important of a hazard to fund – and it is harder than a lot of very acute and physically destructive phenomena (like storms or flooding) in that they’re harder to picture and don’t have lasting physical legacies. Funders will still need to be convinced that heat mitigation is important to fund, but a great deal of what we fund is protecting people by protecting infrastructure – a lot of infrastructure isn’t typically seriously damaged by heat, even when people are injured or hurt by it.
Tragically, I believe that until such a time that heat does significantly damage a place (fish kills, road buckling, transit or power lines melting – all of which can happen during super hot days) we’re not likely to see an increased interest in protecting infrastructure people rely on.
LR: Are there any heat mitigation strategies/policies currently in place in North Carolina that stand out to you?
MC: Raleigh and Durham both have low-income programs for paying for residents’ cooling bills and for providing them with access to life-saving cooling infrastructure in their homes – but both need to be expanded, and that happens with more funding. Both are essentially limited by their current capacity to only serve several hundred people per year per their budget, so the limits on who can apply (and how they can apply) are limiting – but promising! This is a vitally important project – supplying people with what they need to cool their homes and themselves is a life-saving project that deserves more visibility and funding to increase that access to people.
LR: How could other regions or states could draw inspiration from these mitigation strategies?
MC: We also have to figure out how to green that process and stop the process of accessing lifesaving cooling from also worsening the climate crisis by widening power demand – we need to also ensure that power systems are protected to ensure that systems won’t fail in the heat and increased demand for the power needed to cool peoples’ homes, but also to ensure that the power that’s making this possible is coming from a clean(er) source.
Global Change Fellows Risk Communication Seminar (April 12, 2023): https://secasc.ncsu.edu/2023/04/19/global-change-seminar-summary-communicating-risk-in-a-changing-climate/
Imagine Durham 2100 Exhibit: https://www.lifeandscience.org/blog/imagine-durham-2100/