Unprecedented heat wave hits the US 4:18
(CNN) --
When Jane Gilbert was named last summer as Miami-Dade County's first "heat chief," and the first in the country, she was tasked with a seemingly impossible task: raising public awareness of the dangers of heat. extreme heat at the same level as hurricanes.
Gilbert said most of Miami's previous climate-related work focused on adaptation to sea level rise, increased storm surge and flooding, but it was rarely about extreme heat.
Dire warnings issued for oppressive heat in the US as heat wave continues
"Heat was not a big issue," Gilbert told CNN.
"I ended up including it in the city of Miami's climate preparedness strategy, because when I did neighborhood-level outreach in our planning process and drew people's top concerns around climate change, extreme heat and the combined risks of extreme heat with hurricanes came up very frequently."
Heat already kills more Americans than any other weather catastrophe, and the climate crisis has made these extreme events deadlier.
Deaths from heat have outnumbered those from hurricanes by a ratio of more than 15 to 1 in the last decade, according to data from the National Weather Service (NWS).
But unlike hurricanes, the invisible nature of heat does not evoke a sense of urgency in the public's mind.
Extreme heat is the "silent killer."
Gilbert said cities have historically addressed the threat under the umbrella of extreme weather, tending to be overshadowed by strategies for flooding, wildfire and sea level rise.
So when a heat wave hits, it wreaks havoc on infrastructure, health services, worker productivity, and food production, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities and low-income populations.
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"There's never been a function like this, where someone is dedicated exclusively to studying the health and economic impacts of heat, looking across not just the departments in that jurisdiction, in my case within the county, but the agencies and sectors," Gilbert said.
"I'm in charge of breaking down those silos."
As hot records surpass cold ones, American cities are increasingly turning to officials like Gilbert to deal with the crisis.
Following Gilbert's appointment, Phoenix and Los Angeles followed suit, hiring their own heat chiefs in hopes of improving public awareness and the heat-vulnerable fabric of each city to protect lives.
"My role is to better understand the risks, current and future, and secondly to engage the entire community in finding solutions," said Gilbert.
Why is the world facing record heat waves?
Heat islands and public health
The consequences of urban heat do not affect all communities equally.
A recent study from the University of California, San Diego found that low-income neighborhoods and communities with large black, Hispanic and Asian populations experience much more heat than wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods.
This study mirrors an earlier study that goes back to the legacy of discriminatory practices known as "redlining" of neighborhoods, the government-sanctioned effort in the 1930s to segregate people of color by denying them home loans and insurance.
The research looked at 108 US cities and found that 94% of historically censored neighborhoods are disproportionately hotter than other areas in the same city.
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This is due to the so-called urban “heat island” effect, which has made some urban communities even more vulnerable.
Areas with a lot of asphalt, buildings and highways tend to absorb a significant amount of solar energy and emit it as heat.
Areas with green spaces such as parks, rivers, tree-lined streets, absorb and emit less heat.
People play in the water sculpture in the plaza of New York's Rockefeller Center on Tuesday.
"The heat is costing us a lot," Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Center for Resilience at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, the group that leads the appointment of heat chiefs around the world, told CNN.
"It's an infrastructure crisis. It's a health crisis. It's a social and equity crisis."
Phoenix has battled heat inequality.
In Maricopa County, homeless people account for the majority of heat-related deaths, according to David Hondula, Phoenix's heat chief who was appointed late last summer.
But armed with this knowledge, Hondula has deployed staff and volunteers to relieve the area's homeless population and eliminate heat-related hazards.
This led to an interagency partnership with the Phoenix division of homeless services, Hondula said.
On each shift on the streets, a case manager from the division joined the Hondula team on the ground to help manage housing issues that the Hondula team would otherwise be unable to answer, and said this has meant a big difference in their approach.
"The other day, literally the minute we pulled into a parking lot, we got in touch with a family of nine or 10 people who lived in their car, and because our case manager was there, at the end of our shift, we all they were on their way to a shelter that same night," he told CNN.
"While we're excited to put cold water in people's hands and educate them about cooling centers, these are significant differences that will really pay off in the long run to keep people safe in our community."
What to do to face the heat wave in the United States?
0:50
Marta Segura was named Los Angeles heat chief just four weeks ago, and now she faces a similar challenge.
Due to the large number of homeless people in the city, she said it has been difficult to find specific and comprehensive solutions to protect them from extreme heat.
"Extreme heat exacerbates those [pre-existing health] conditions and stagnates pollution and smoke, and that's why we're facing more deaths and hospitalizations in our most vulnerable communities that also have the least tree canopy and open space," Segura told CNN.
Segura stated that these communities need more than shade and water.
He said he plans to modify building codes to create more climate-friendly and resilient homes that allow residents to stay safe and cool during scorching heat waves.
From homeless communities to infants and seniors, climate change will only put the most vulnerable people at greater risk if cities don't rethink how they're designed to adapt to heat, Segura said. .
If drastic measures are not taken, the inhabitants of these areas will have to radically change their way of life to adapt to harsher heat waves.
With cities "rapidly urbanizing and the urban heat island effect exacerbating," Baughman McLeod said people are unprepared for rising temperatures.
However, cities also have the power to change that trajectory.
"In my opinion, cities have in their hands the levers that determine how hot cities and regions will be, how comfortable people are in those cities and regions, but also the lever for many of the programs and strategies that can keep people safe in hot weather," Hondula said.
climate change heat wave