Extreme Heat - Are we prepared? What can we do? | Andrea Armstrong (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Silent Spring Consultants & Maastricht Sustainability Insititute)
We provide dessert for the break after the seminar. Please register if you want to join and/or enjoy the dessert!
Climate risks such as heatwaves and drought are predicted to become more frequent and intensify over the coming decades. Every year, heatwaves claim the lives of infants, older people, and people with chronic health conditions. The 2003 European heatwave killed more than 70,000 people, and the 2015 heatwave in India reportedly killed over 2,500 people. People living in urban areas – and especially the urban poor and those most vulnerable to heat - are amongst the hardest hit when a heatwave occurs because these are hotter than the surrounding countryside.
Deaths from heatwaves are not inevitable and it is crucial that cities incorporate heat-reduction tactics such as green spaces into their plans for growth or retrofit them in built areas. In addition to threatening the lives and health of vulnerable populations, heatwaves have cascading impacts in other areas of society, such as reduced economic output, strained health systems and rolling power outages.
As Mark Watts, Executive Director of C40 Cities said, “Cities that are used to hot weather need to prepare for even longer periods of sweltering heat and cooler cities need to prepare for levels of extreme heat that they are not accustomed to”. Heat actions in cities are happening but far more work is needed to reduce and manage heat risks and ensure cities are resilient to heat shocks as the frequency and intensity of heatwaves increases.
The BeBrit Extreme Heat Risk project, led by Dr Andrea Armstrong and funded by the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, explores country and city actions to mitigate and adapt to extreme heat, comparing cases from Belgium, the UK and around the world. This seminar will present findings and propose future avenues and collaborations.
Andrea Armstrong, PhD in Geography from Durham University, UK, is the Research Director of Silent Spring Consultants, senior guest researcher at VUB and researcher and course coordinator at the Maastricht Sustainability Insititute. Her research centres on extreme heat risks, climate adaptation and resilience. She is currently leading the BeBrit Extreme Risk project and involved in a Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) project called Consumer Demand and Circular Urban Living (CDCUL).