![]() Perversely, extreme heat promises to keep costing people and governments more just as they’ll need more and more money to adapt to it. Heat is killing and injuring many Americans while striking the country at the core of its economic machine, with serious consequences for workers, businesses, and local governments. Almost everyone, almost everywhere, at some point soon, will be feeling them.Īs the study shows, the warning lights are flashing furiously. While the study focuses on the United States, it has global relevance: A key lesson is that there’s no escape from the effects of extreme heat. Combining our expertise with data analysis by the research firm Vivid Economics, the study is designed to quantify some of the most important economic and social impacts of heat in the United States today-and to project what they’ll look like in the not-too-distant future. That’s the motive behind a groundbreaking study unveiled today by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which I lead. Yet we cannot effectively combat extreme heat until we understand its scope. ![]() It’s much harder to measure the impact of something as insidious and widespread as rising summer temperatures. Surveying the wreckage from a tropical storm, we can calculate its cost to the economy and toll in lives. Though heat kills more Americans annually than any other natural disaster, it does so without the drama of a hurricane ripping the roof off a house.Įxtreme heat also tends to escape our attention because the data on its effects is lacking and the problem is hard to quantify. Its consequences manifest themselves in the person found dead from heat stroke at home the farm worker collapsed in the field the public rail system melting down. One reason is that heat often destroys quietly. But heat itself is too often overlooked as a destructive force in its own right. Most people know the knock-on effects of global warming by now: rising sea levels, mass extinction of plants and wildlife, worsening floods, fires, and hurricanes like the one that battered Louisiana this week. On my own vacation, as I listened to radio ads heralding the joys of beach season, I found myself wondering how any of us can relax at a time when so many people are at risk and dying. Rising heat: It’s been the theme of this American summer.Īs we confront wildfires, “heat domes,” and moments like the day in July when more than one-third of US states were under extreme heat warnings, our very conception of summer is changing-from a time of fun and leisure to an extended period of emergency.
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