Rising temperatures and increasingly frequent heat waves driven by the climate change They are turning many Mediterranean cities into dangerous places during the summer, especially for the vulnerable population. “We don’t focus enough on how extreme temperatures affect urban environments,” she criticizes Eleni Mirivili, who has spent years studying this problem in his hometown of Athens, one of the hardest hit by the rise in thermometers. In 2014, she was elected Deputy Mayor for Urban Nature and Climate Adaptation in the Greek capital, and after a stay at Harvard University to investigate urban resilience to high temperatures, she returned to Greece to become the first head of heat in a European city. Her work in this area earned him the nomination director of world heat [chief heat officer] In United Nations Habitat. Her country, Greece, is experiencing the worst heat wave in history.
Ask. What is a heat boss for?
Answer. To protect the most vulnerable people – that fewer people die from high temperatures – and to integrate different policies into the city to make it cooler. There are many aspects of the city that have to do with heat and someone has to coordinate them. Imagine having a lot of money and buying air conditioning for the whole world: then we’d end up like those cities where everyone lives inside and where it’s unbearable outside. And in Europe, in the cities of the Mediterranean, the beauty is outside: we love to go out and drink wine or beer in the evening, have fun, stroll and talk. It would be terrible if our cities ended up being uninhabitable. This is the nightmare to avoid: we cannot turn our cities into those of Abu Dhabi or Qatar.
Q. But most European cities do not have this figure.
R. It doesn’t have to be called head of heat, they can also be people who work in sustainability or resilience. Cities are creating departments that work more horizontally and less isolated.
Q. How can cities get cold?
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R. The most important thing is to bring nature into cities in a much more radical way than before: nature and water are essential to refresh them. Trees not only provide shade, but they evapotranspire and recover heat energy, thus also cooling the surrounding area. We also need shadows, because they enhance the way we feel heat. We need to make sure our public spaces have more water, more shade and fewer cars, because cars are a problem in cities: they add heat, because they burn fossil fuels, and they give off hot air, just like air conditioning. Cars and air conditioning make our public space hotter. So we have to get rid of cars and use air conditioning to a minimum, and especially for people who need it. We must also look for materials that are permeable to water, that do not absorb heat and that increase the shading of buildings and the circulation of air.
The most important thing is to bring nature into cities in a much more radical way than before
Q. What is Athens doing to mitigate the high temperatures?
R. We do things in three categories: awareness, preparation, and redesign. In the first we try to make people (journalists, politicians, everyone) understand how dangerous the heat is: that we have longer, more intense and more frequent waves, and that they will get worse. Last year more than 60,000 people died in Europe from extreme heat – a huge number, especially when compared to any other disaster. But we are not ready yet. Until now we didn’t know how to correctly quantify the people who die from the heat, because many go to the hospital and die of a heart attack or whatever, and they are not reported as heat deaths; now let’s count the excess mortality.
Q. What else did they do?
R. We made a classification of heat waves — which Seville also does — with a specific algorithm for Athens. We use that algorithm to measure the risk to people, in three categories (1, 2 and 3). Three is very dangerous, we had one a few days ago. It’s important to categorize because that’s how our brains work: We think in categories for the most dangerous things. Also, this year we’re starting to name heatwaves in Greece, something Seville did last year with Zoe. When you give it a name, people give it a serious entity, you understand that it’s something that exists and that it’s dangerous.
Q. And how is the risk communicated to the population?
R. We have an early warning system: depending on the category, we send differentiated alerts both to social services personnel who work with the vulnerable population and to those in nursing homes. They are messages that advise what to do to protect yourself from the heat, that you shouldn’t go out at certain times… We also have a program to visit the elderly in their homes to make sure they are well. And this information is received by kindergartens, the coordination center of NGOs working with refugees or immigrants, with the homeless… We try to inform those who work with vulnerable people.
Q. What precautions do you take to prepare for the heat?
R. We’ve launched a hotline so people can call if they need help or want to ask something [sobre el calor]. Municipal staff and the Red Cross participate. We’ve also created a website so people know how to take care of themselves, how to cool their home, and what to do if they get heatstroke. In addition, we have a mobile application called Extrema Global that tells you every day what your personalized risk is when you walk around the city and where are the cool places you can go, from air-conditioned public facilities to train stations, subway stations, swimming pools, parks… The app it also tells you how to get from point A to point B along the most beautiful roads, because they have included all the trees. The Red Cross brings vans with water and information to tourist areas. And we’ve opened up cooling spots so people can go during heatwaves.
We need to transform climate shelters into more interesting places or connect them to cultural events.
Q. I understand that is what Barcelona calls climate shelters.
R. Yes. They are needed for people with energy poverty, or who are not comfortable at home. It would be nice if people could gather in these kind of air-conditioned places, especially the lonely, the elderly, the vulnerable. But for now, generally, they don’t do it, because they feel stigmatized there, because it seems that only the poor go there. We need to turn them into more interesting places or link them to cultural events. We are opening refrigeration centers, but many people will not go. We also need to create refreshing spaces outside, with shade and play areas for children, to make them more attractive to everyone.
Q. What is urban redevelopment?
R. We have created guidelines on how to make public spaces — streets, squares and parks — fresh with plants, water and different materials. But if we don’t limit cars and asphalt in cities, we won’t have enough space to make them cooler. That space can be used to create linear parks along the streets. We have created small densely packed green areas in streets and crossroads, called pocket parks, which serve to increase biodiversity and favor the wind. We’ve also made the lanes narrower, so the cars have to go slower. Spain is doing incredible things in this field: Barcelona are taking away space from cars to make superblocks. And in Oslo they have already got rid of most of the cars.
Q. How about building squares without shade, like the Puerta del Sol?
R. Today it is criminal to build squares without shade or cooling elements, because they create higher temperatures in the city, put people’s lives at risk and push people away from public space. It’s very crazy to design squares as if climate change doesn’t exist.
R. What will happen to cities that don’t comply?
R. That many people will die in them and many more will lose their jobs. It will hit the economy, because a lot of income is lost due to extreme heat: productivity decreases, people go less to shops because people stay at home… And we will have to make an effort to avoid shortages of water, food and power outages during heat waves. Adaptation has to do with food and medicine, logistics, and people who will be hospitalized and die. We need to prepare our hospitals for days of extreme heat.
Q. Why is it so important to talk about heat?
R. The heat exposes the vulnerability of our cities and attacks the poorest: the sick —physically or mentally— and the elderly and small children; it attacks the most vulnerable people in our society, those who do not have good housing, are poorly paid, suffer from energy poverty, cannot turn on air conditioning or live in good conditions, or cannot afford to take a car or a plane and go somewhere cooler when it is very hot in the city. These people need to be protected.
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