What does it mean to make heat a central part of social, cultural, political and economic analysis of the city. Our Karachi team addressed this question in a recent panel, “Scorching Cities.”

On January 23rd 2021, Cool Infrastructures Karachi team member Adam Abdullah presented at a session titled “Climate Adaptive Heat Stress Management in South Asia” hosted jointly by the Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe), India, and the Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN), and supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

In March 2021 the Cool Infrastructures team attended a Sustainable Energy for All #ThisisCool Webinar, entitled Cooling for All and Gender: Towards Inclusive, Sustainable Cooling Solutions. Dr Anindrya Nastiti reflects on the gender sensitive cooling policies and strategies outlined during the event.

Elspeth Oppermann presented the initial results of the Covid-Heat Nexus survey at the 8th Global Dialogue platform, in a session put together by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and the Global Heat Health Information network. 

An updated version of our large scale, multi country dataset on heat and Covid-19 is now available. Since uploading the raw data a few months ago, the team has been hard at work cleaning it up for greater ease of use.

Elspeth Oppermann talks to “Can’t Take the Heat” about how people living in cities across the Global South deal with the dual impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and extreme heat.

As part of our engagement on COVID-19, in August 2020 the Cool Infrastructures project completed a rapid, large scale data collection exercise across four cities in India, Pakistan, Cameroon and Indonesia. The exercise was intended to produce critical information and resources about the nexus of Covid-19 and extreme heat for particularly vulnerable urban populations. 

Open access dataset: Cool Infrastructures has made available a large, multi-country dataset on heat and Covid-19.

This 3000 word essay, published on the Medical Humanities Blog, Somatosphere, outlines the paradoxes for governments and urban authorities of managing heat and COVID-19 simultaneously.

COVID-19 amplifies the risks of hot weather, and 2020 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record.