 Hello and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing today living with climate change extreme heat. I'm Dan Berset executive director of the environmental and energy study Institute. The environmental and energy study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science based information about environmental energy and climate change topics for policymakers. Recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on bill financing programs to help make energy efficiency, beneficial electrification and renewable energy more accessible and affordable for their customers. EESI provides informative objective nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics briefings written materials and on social media. All of our educational resources including briefing recordings fact sheets issue briefs articles newsletters and podcasts always available for free online at www.esi.org. If you'd like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources. Just take a moment to subscribe to our biweekly newsletter climate change solutions. This is the last regular installment of our briefing series living with climate change. In addition to extreme heat. We've also covered the polar vortex sea level rise and wildfires. We're cooking up a little something by way of a bonus installment which will take place during the week of July 11 and discuss approaches to integrating equity into emergency management. We're also approaching the end of our companion briefing series scaling up innovation to drive down emissions. In that series, we've learned about green hydrogen direct air capture electric vehicle charging infrastructure and are looking forward to offshore wind energy this coming Wednesday to review presentation materials and summary notes and RSVP for offshore wind energy next week. Check out our resources www.esi.org forward slash briefings and just a hint. We're cooking up a bonus briefing in this series to When we plan these briefings we figured it made sense to start with the polar vortex in April and end with extreme heat in June because the topics matched up with the seasons. And as it turned out, a briefing today is unfortunately extremely timely, because extreme heat is everywhere in the news. It is really really hot in the south and Texas and Alaska and the Northwest, and for longer stretches of days, which makes it so much harder to cope with extreme heat already causes more deaths than any other type of weather event. And our days and nights are getting hotter and hotter for longer and longer requires new resources and policies. We need to ensure that homes and commercial buildings for example are more resilient to extreme heat. Cooling equipment has to become more energy efficient to help mitigate extra stress and strain on the electric grid on those very hot days which is already when it tends to struggle the most. And we have to take care to address the welfare and health of those whose work puts them at extra risk of extreme heat exposure. If you want to learn even more about human health and heat visit www.esa.org to read our latest question and answer article with Paul Shram an expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shout out to Jonathan hers a fellow on our staff who helped us with that article. But before we get to our panelists, let me remind everyone that we will have a little time for questions actually a lot of time for questions today. We are best to incorporate questions from the audience. If you have a question you can send it to us one of two ways. You can send us an email and the email address to use is ask at EESI.org that's ASK at EESI.org, or even better follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send it to us by responding to the live tweeting bonus points if you use the hashtag EESI talk. To introduce our panelists we are joined today by a very special guest. Bonnie Watson Coleman serves is serving her fourth term in the US House of Representatives, the continuation of a career and public service advocating for the needs of all New Jersey families and equitable treatment of all people. As a woman to represent New Jersey in Congress, Representative Watson Coleman is a member of the Appropriations Committee and the Homeland Security Committee, where she serves as chair of the subcommittee on transportation and maritime security. She also serves as vice chair at large of the Congressional Progressive Caucus representative Watson Coleman. Thank you so much for joining our briefing today. Hello everyone. I'm Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, and I represent New Jersey's 12th district. I'm honored to have the opportunity to welcome you all to EESI's briefing on the impacts of extreme heat. And I'd like to thank EESI for all the great work you do to educate the public on not just how we can fight the root causes of the climate crisis, but the steps we can take to build more climate resilient communities. As our planet warms extreme weather events are becoming more unpredictable, more frequent and more dangerous. Last year, California saw the single largest wildfire in its history. While on the East Coast, Hurricane Ida devastated communities across my home state and others. People in California heard about Hurricane Ida and people in New Jersey heard about the California wildfires, hurricanes and wildfires. These are tragic natural disasters and they're treated as such by the media, the government and society as a whole. However, extreme heat doesn't get that type of response and yet studies show that it is actually the deadliest natural disaster. This month, I introduced legislation to finally start treating it that way. The Stay Cool Act is a first of its kind comprehensive package that would invest in heat resilient infrastructure, emergency preparedness and support for our communities at risk. In poor communities and communities of color, extreme heat isn't just a nuisance, it's like threatening. In addition to directing the federal government to treat heat waves with the urgency they demand, the Stay Cool Act would invest in public cooling spaces, urban tree canopies, air conditioning for public housing and other heat relief measures that vulnerable communities desperately need. While building a safer, more livable future for our children must be a priority, we cannot ignore the current reality of life on a warming planet. In addition to combating the causes of climate change, the government must also address the consequences people are facing right now. With that said, I hope you're all looking forward to an important informative discussion about mitigating the impacts of extreme heat. Thank you for all being here today and thank you again to EESI for organizing this event. Well thank you Representative Watson Coleman for joining us today and sharing your perspective on the issue and congratulations on the successful introduction of your bill. Our first of three panelists is Dr. Ladd Keith. Ladd is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona. An urban planner by training, he has over a decade of experience planning for climate change with diverse stakeholders in cities across the United States. His current research explores heat planning and governance with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Transportation. Ladd, welcome to our briefing today, I'm really, really looking forward to your presentation. Great, thank you so much, Dan. So today I'm going to cover planning for urban heat resilience and this stems from a report published by the American Planning Association. That is free thanks to a grant from NOAA and so I'll provide that link at the end of my presentation. And it was written by myself and co-author Sarah Miro at Arizona State University so I'll just give some highlights from this report. First of all, of course, urban heat and extreme heat are growing risks for the country and for the world as a whole so we've seen continued rises in average temperatures. The United States has warmed about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit which doesn't sound like a lot but I'll explain why that's important in a minute and we're projected to go up to 12 degrees if we don't rain and greenhouse gas emissions. So what we've seen increases in the intensity duration frequency and seasonality of extreme heat events like heat waves and so as you can see in the figure here just that small increase in that average annual temperature is really pushing us into more hot weather and more record hot weather that we've never experienced before. And that's due to both climate change of course and then the urban heat island effect so how we plan and design cities and then the waste heat that's emitted from things like vehicles and very conditioning. So the impacts from heat of course the public health impacts are the most widely noted and that's important and of course heat is the number one weather related killer in the United States. But it also affects quality of life and so not just the deaths we need to look at but also hospitalizations untreated illness and just the general quality of life of our community members. It affects economic productivity that affects our labor and it also has environmental impact so our energy and water usage goes up. And it also impacts landscapes and ecology both within cities and then of course, you know stress is forced and that's why we've seen an increase of those forest fires particularly in the western United States. Heat also has major impacts on infrastructure and although they're not as visible sometimes as events like hurricanes or floods or wildfires even. It does have substantial impacts on built infrastructure and actually earlier this week one of San Francisco's Bart rails derailed because the temperatures got too hot and we saw similar things last year during the Pacific Northwest heat wave where the street cars in Portland were literally the wires were melting roads were buckling and so there are substantial infrastructure impacts. And then of course decreases the resilience and reliability of our energy systems to one major point here is that we feel heat a little bit differently all across the country so of course I'm hearing the Southwest when we have a heat wave it is dangerous, but we also have chronic heat throughout the year that's dangerous for our populations. And that's a little bit different than places like the Pacific Northwest, where last year during their heat wave they had 1400 people die in the United States and Canada. And if you think of that compared to hurricane like hurricane Katrina 2005 that killed 1800 people. If this was a hurricane we would have called it a mass casualty event but unfortunately we perceive heat waves and the resulting impacts from those a little bit differently. One of the reasons for that is that heat is a very complex climate risk so it's invisible largely. And so we don't see it as much as those other more dramatic events. But then also the question is kind of which heat are you talking about some so a lot of cities are using urban heat island maps with land surface temperature from the satellites which is kind of shown in the right hand side of this figure, which is a picture of potentially hot spots in our cities by that urban heat island effect, but if you're actually human being in your built environment under a bus stop. You're going to feel different than someone that's walking their dog in full sun, and very different than an office worker that is in a air conditioned building to so kind of your, your positionality in the built environment exposes you to different types of heat and we need to keep that in mind. And the human thermal comfort aspect and displayed by those orange colors is also a little bit different than what you might see on your phone, which is the ambient air temperature or hear from the National Weather Service when they say what the reply for the day will be. So there's lots of different types of heat. Equity in urban heat is a big topic and so he does and equitably distributed across our urban areas part of us due to Lake of the legacy of racist land use practices like redlining, but we also have continued community disinvestment which leads lower income communities marginalized communities minority communities to typically have less vegetation more impervious services and to be physically hotter. And so the more populations and those community members are literally exposed to temperatures that can be 10 or 12 degrees hotter than the richer and wider counterparts across the city. We also have a lot of systematic inequities that we need to look at. And so, just things like housing affordability and quality, do you have access to indoor cooling and can you afford to run your air conditioner. So there's a lot of similarities between workplace and school environments for thermal comfort transportation patterns and what safe transportation modes are able to use access to health care, and very importantly exclusion from decision making, and I would say at all levels of government so you know public hearings in cities are notoriously exclusive towards lower income and marginalized populations. And of course that goes up to the state and federal government to and so how able are people able to participate in their democratic processes and are their voices being heard. So from our book we present a urban heat resilience planning framework and we call urban heat resilience. The idea there is the concept is proactively mitigate and manage urban heat across the many systems and sectors that affects. We tend to get communities to think more about those different contributors to heat so climate change urban heat island natural weather patterns, think about those impacts holistically so social impacts, economic impacts environmental impacts and infrastructural impacts, and then think about the two main categories that cities and local communities are using to address heat which is heat mitigation and heat management. So for those two buckets, heat mitigation is reducing urban heat in the cities and communities that we have based on how we've built them historically. And so the idea here is that we need to mitigate urban heat as much as possible through changing our land uses improving our urban design to increase shade, increasing urban greening in some places as strategically necessary, and reducing waste heat again from car vehicles and air conditioning units that may be inefficient. And heat mitigation is largely the purview of urban planners architects landscape architects kind of those that have an impact on the physical built environment. We also have heat management, which is responding and preparing to the heat that we cannot get rid of and we can't mitigate right. And so some of that is for preparing for heat waves, of course. But then we need to think more holistically about heat management it's not just preparing our emergency managers to deal with the heat wave when it happens it's also about addressing the systematic inequities I mentioned earlier. So do we have resilient and affordable energy systems can we help people reduce their personal heat exposure throughout their homes their workplace and their travel patterns. Can we improve our public health and medical systems to address heat illness when it does occur. And then of course, we do need to prepare for those heat waves as they happen for all segments of our population. And so we're really urging everyone to think kind of holistically about all of those strategies heat management has largely been the purview of just public health and emergency managers and we really need to break down the barriers between these two sets of strategies. For heat mitigation specifically, we have many different tools available for communities to reduce heat in the built environment, and we've done surveys of communities across the country have done interviews with policymakers across the country. And we've done plan analysis of plans across the country to. And what we found is, well there's this, there's an important concept here that all that I'll start with, called the network of plans and the idea here is that it's not just one single plan in a community that determines the future of the built environment it's all of the plans and policies put together that really shaped the future of the built environment and the urban heat island effect. And what we found through our research is communities are largely when they do address heat which is still not often across the country unfortunately but when communities are beginning to address heat. And they think of it as a climate action plan kind of thing, which you can see there. And they also think of things like urban forestry, which is in our parks open space and connections public investment category. And the important concept here is that to address heat and the built environment, we need to include it in community visioning and engagement across all plans and policies not just climate action plans. We need to regulate the future built environment and future projects that come up from developers and think about heat similarly to how we think of flood or wildfire risk, and we need to think of all of our public investments, not just parks or urban forestry but also transportation and transit infrastructure in our public buildings as well. So I'll end my talk just kind of bridging this back out a little bit larger to the federal government. And so this is coming from a piece in nature that we published with my coauthors on last fall. And we're really calling for more heat governance to help advance that concept of urban heat resilience and so here we define heat governance as the actor strategies, processes and institutions the guide decision making getting a managing heat as a hazard. The idea here is that we've managed floodplain risk for over 100 years we've managed drought risk since the dust bowl. We've managed wildfire risk poorly, many would say but we've managed it for over 100 years soon we've been improving that heat risk is really a new climate risk that we have not. We've managed to develop our governance structures to even even deal with it all and so kind of one example I like to give is that in the last year we've had the first three dedicated heat officials and Miami Dade County, the city of Phoenix and just last week and the city of Los Angeles. So I'll hold it my answer, three dedicated local officials for heat governance, but that's compared with tens of thousands of floodplain managers and every county and community across the United States. We have dedicated professionals working on local heat governance, but we have 19,000 very diverse communities, you know town cities of all sizes and of all geographies in the country so we need to come up with governance structures that work for all of those communities to be able to address heat as a hazard. So just to kind of recap, we really need to advance heat equity with everything that we do. And the White House is justice 40 initiative is a great example of how that can be done holistically kind of across the federal government. But we also need to address the systematic inequities and again, participation in democracy, making sure that everyone has a little voice in their local decision making is really important for that. We need to both mitigate and manage heat like I discussed, but to do that we need to break down those barriers between urban planning and public health and emergency management. And that's going to take some work because those groups have not those groups and departments and disciplines have not traditionally worked together and the way that they will be required to work together locally at the state level and nationally to address heat hazard. And we've seen some great examples, you know, and we can discuss that during the questions and answers but we've seen some great examples of communities beginning to bridge those divides between those disciplines. We need to think through the metrics that we will measure success for addressing heat on and an example of that would be do we want to reduce land surface temperatures and give all communities access to urban heat island maps which many of them don't have access to them Is that going to be the metric that we look at. Do we want to decrease heat deaths and maybe set a goal for net zero heat deaths because all heat deaths are preventable. Do we want to reduce heat illnesses and hospitalizations. You can imagine like the number of different metrics that apply to different disciplines and so unfortunately some of those can be difficult to measure. And not all communities have the access to resources to measure this properly. And really quickly, we need to coordinate all of these initiatives within local governments across government scales from local state and federal government. And of course between the federal governments to various agencies. And finally we need to build heat institutions because again these institutions and actors and processes just aren't in place. So this is the United States NITIS program which is the National Heat Health Information System, which is an interagency group led by NOAA CDC EPA and others that's helping to begin coordinate some of those initiatives and address heat, but currently does not have enough resources to really again serve those 19,000 communities across the whole country, but every agency has a role and I'd be happy to discuss some of those and the questions and answers to. Thank you for the time for this presentation I'm looking forward to hear the other panelists talk and this slide and I believe all of the presenter slides will be available on the EESI website, but both of these resources planning for urban heat resilience. Again is free thanks to a NOAA grant and the nature piece on heat governance is also free and available for everyone to read. Thank you. Yeah, that was a great presentation and yes indeed those resources are available. If you visit our website www.esa.org. Also posted our slides great super informative if anyone would like to go back and revisit those slides, his slides and the slides of our other panelists will be posted. The next reminder is if you have questions if you were listening to lads presentation and you got an idea for question and send us an email email address to use this ask at ESI.org or you can follow us online on Twitter at ESI online. Our second panelist today is Sonal Gessel Sonal is the director of policy at we act for environmental justice. We are available for advancing the organization's policy agenda at the state local and national levels. In addition to leading its New York City policy initiatives in the northern Manhattan climate action. Sonal, it's great to see you today. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks Dan. I'm just going to pull up my slides. So as Dan said, I'm Sonal Gessel director of policy at we act for environmental justice today I'm talking about why extreme heat is a major environmental justice issue and some active steps we are taking and anyone can take to address it. Before I begin, we act as a community based organization that based in West Harlem, we are membership based organization you have about 800 active members at a time, all mostly but it's open to anyone. We do focus on Harlem Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods these are neighborhoods are predominantly people of color and low income and we've been organizing these communities are against environmental racism since 1988. So, we got a great start so I'll go through some of these couple slides quickly. He waves in general are increasing and severity frequency and duration, and we have to respond to quite swiftly to this growing threat in New York City as we projected that there'd be by there be over 3000 heat deaths by 2080 if we do not do anything if we keep to the status quo 3000 heat deaths annually. So one reason why we're really worried about extreme heat in a place like New York City is because we have the urban heat island effect in which we do see higher cooling because I mean higher more heat because buildings. Cars all create a lot of heat, there's a lot of concrete where he gets trapped into into our streets and so we see much much much higher temperatures in New York City compared to the suburb or rural areas outside of the city with much more vegetation. So extreme heat is actually the number one weather related killer in the United States. Most people think about hurricanes or tornadoes as big killers and it's true, however, he is sort of what people consider the silent killer because it does fly under the radar. A lot of times heat deaths. Don't get recorded as heat desperate get recorded as strokes heart attacks, other kinds of causes mortality on their hospital records. So sometimes it can be really hard to track who is really being hospitalized or going to the ER or dying from extreme heat however that is what is found to be the told the whole truth. However, this is a quote I don't actually know who it's attributed to but I think people have heard this many times before we are in the same storm but not in the same boat, so not everyone is impacted by heat equally and not everybody experiences the same temperatures and so the reason why we act for environmental justice works on this issue was because we do consider it a major environmental justice issue in which people vulnerable certain vulnerable populations are disproportionately burdened and impacted by extreme heat. So these are the kind of traditional people that we talk about that are impacted by extreme heat the worst older adults children people with chronic illness like respiratory illnesses, people who are pregnant, people who are working outdoors for long hours. So these are all the populations we really traditionally talk about. However, we act, we look at populations that are actually attributed to having more heat illness and death and impacts due to a lot of structural reasons structural and institutional racism over the years that has led other populations to also be vulnerable to extreme heat. So in New York City we have a lot of older poorly maintained apartment buildings is true in cities across the United States, where buildings do not cool down at night, they do not cool efficiently even if you with an air conditioner or fan, and they are poorly ventilated and so you have people living in spaces that are that do accentuate the impacts of heat. People also live in really crowded apartment something that is found and research is that in low income communities where you can't afford to run our own multiple air conditioning units you might all spend time in one room together intergenerationally. And that can have some impacts such as children needing to concentrate to do their homework but they can't when they're in a crowded space for example so there are a lot of reverberated impacts on due to extreme heat. Also neighborhoods that have less green space more air pollution industrial sites buildings. All of that comes from environmental racism in which communities of color and low income have been disproportionately burdened with highways and industrial sites and traffic and all of these different sources of air pollution and sources of heat. And they are also places that did not and still do not receive enough investment in green spaces and trees and infrastructure that lowers temperatures or helps people adapt to the heat on a daily basis and a lot of that has been connected to the racist legacy of redlining in which across the United States in which many many many parts of cities across the United States were considered not worthy of investment from the government or for housing investment. And what we got was no parks in places like Harlem in New York City. Then it's also people that are already stretching the resilience people who are dealing with housing insecurity food insecurity, rent burdens chronic illness concerns around their immigration status. So many more issues that are really affecting people to this day that frankly does take a lot of people's ability to be resilient that takes up all it creates a lot of psycho social stress. And what it does is it makes it difficult for people to respond to protecting themselves against extreme heat when they're concerned about responding to making sure they have the medications that they need for example. So, when we talk about extreme heat is very much a risk multiplier in the United States we've dealt with environmental racism for a long time but climate change as it gets much worse. There are actually accentuating issues that already exist. Environmental racism, which I've used a term a couple times but really is the idea that there is discrimination in the ways that people benefit or are harmed by in the environment. So when it comes to policy when it comes to interpersonal relationships or when it comes to big systemic policies. This all leads to environmental health impacts and because of climate change and therefore we're seeing rise in extreme heat. It's not only an issue individually for itself, but it risks it accents existing problems that are people are already doing with so. For example, when we're talking about rental insecurity people trying to afford their rent and an increasingly expensive world. Extreme heat just makes that matter worse where they might not be able to afford paying the utility bills to cool their home down. If they're worried about paying for their rent and not getting evicted from their homes. We Act has been working in extreme heat for a couple years now and we've particularly launched a heat health and equity initiative where we have been talked to members of the northern Manhattan public about what they're dealing with when it comes to extreme heat. And the thing that came up the most when we asked these open into questions about heat was that they are most concerned around getting adequate cooling both in their homes and in their sort of daily lives outside of their homes as well. And that is the biggest issue that people are grappling with and we know that access to cooling is also the number one preventer of of heat illness and death as well. So that is what we focus on as an organization when it comes to extreme heat. Ultimately what we came to after speaking with our members of northern Manhattan was that there is a strong desire for a holistically healthy and cool home. And that is something that disproportionately communities of low income and color have not been given in the United States, and particularly in our conversation about New York City that has been true. Landlords that are not properly maintaining homes, the lack of access to air conditioning fans or just an energy efficient home. Very high and currently increasing utility bills. Chronic illness from for children or elderly people poorly ventilated home that exposes you to air pollution such as knocks from your gas stove and homes that do not cool down during the day all of these are different ways that extreme that a home has been made unhealthy as related to extreme heat. So when we spoke to our members we did hear a lot about what they thought the issues were and this is sort of a little graphic of a lot of the different things that people said, they said that you shouldn't have to travel 19 blocks to get cool for example so when trying to access a cool place to go, there should be more immediate access for people so cooling centers that are close by, or a home that's cool. People feel that their legislators their decision makers do not understand the issue and do not care. There have been a lot of statements of around the fact that the legislators do not understand what people are dealing with on a daily basis and are not making decisions based off of supporting the needs of people on the vulnerable populations. I feel that most decisions that are made are going after short term fixes instead of long term interventions that will fix the problem, both mitigate and adapt to extreme heat, for example, providing someone with an AC is not the same thing as creating an energy efficient that is actually fully healthy, put subsidizing utility bills not the same as having a lower utility bill, things like that. People also feel that their utility providers do not care about their health and well being as well. And many people talked about how they trade off their needs so someone was talking about how they prioritized their health needs over their pulling needs or they prioritize their children getting cooling over them getting cooling, lots of things like that. So in response to this work with our membership and their growing research that we do at we act we have created a policy agenda we did this first in 2020 and now we have one in 2022, where we essentially are have outlined and we will it is one of the provided links for everyone. But this outlines what we are hoping to achieve, both as short term responses which is, you know, the idea that providing cooling subsidizing utility bills, having adaptive measures and parts like having misters and making sure there's people doing community outreach around extreme heat safety are all short term emergency response solutions and those types of things are outlined in our agenda but what's also outlined in our agenda are long term high impact solutions such as electrifying low income housing and subsidizing that elective the cost of electrifying low income housing, switching out fossil fuel energy for renewable energy to lower utility bills provide a more resilient energy system, and ultimately reduce air pollution for example. We also believe that office buildings that are not in use should not be able to set their temperatures to 68 degrees. We do think there needs to be better communications and better warning systems around extreme heat one thing we are interested in seeing piloted across the United States are heat warning systems, much like the way that California does for a fire warning systems where you know there might be a rating so in New York City if there's a really hot day we might get an alert like we're at a heat level five this is a very very dangerous day. These are the types of policy items that we outlined in here that we want to see done that is informed by the membership that we work with. I believe that is it. Thank you all I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks so much. So many great points you brought up. I really like the energies that the side by side house slide and I might borrow what you said about stretching people's resilience that's a great way to think about that so thanks so much for your presentation and as a reminder to our audience if you'd like to go back and revisit someone's presentation or with your slides everything's available at www.esi.org we're getting some questions from the audience so. Thanks for that. You can send us questions via email ask at esi.org or follow us on Twitter at ESI online. Our third panelist today is Dr Juan Declatt Berreto. He is the senior science social scientists for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists at Union of Concerned Scientists Juan researches maps, researches maps, analyzes and finds solutions, the unequal human health and livelihood impacts of environmental hazards, particularly those exacerbated by climate change. Juan, it's great to see you today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Can you hear me okay. I can hear you great. Okay. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you to ESI for the opportunity to brief congressional staff in the public on existing and projected impacts from extreme heat, augmented by climate change. Today I would like to share with you how we at the Union of Concerned Scientists are thinking and researching extreme heat impacts on the population. I'll focus on two recent relatively recent reports. The first one is focused on the societal choices we have to avoid the worst of climate change augmented extreme heat impacts. And the second one is a is a an analysis when we calculated wages lost by outdoor workers due to extreme heat on the various scenarios for carbon emission productions. I will finish with a few opportunities to for federal and local action on climate change, and I hope to contribute to the conversation on how to urgently and equitably act on time. As the previous two presenters said extreme heat already present serious dangers to our health and livelihoods and it is currently the top weather related cost of death in the US. And that heat is on the rise as climate change continues on a beta. To illustrate how our summers have changed due to climate change, I would like to borrow a passage from a recent op-ed written by my UCS colleague Eric Spanger Siegfried. Start quote a new climate reality has emerged if it's warm, it's dangerous season barbecues beaches vacations it's summer. Alongside its pleasures though summer in a warning world isn't what it used to be if global warming is our world's underlying disease may through October in the northern hemisphere is when it's fever spikes and it's worth symptom surface in the form of increasingly frequent and severe climate events. End quote. Calling the summer danger season is a stark reminder of what we are facing. Consider for example that summer officially started earlier this week, and this year's hurricane season just started on June 1. But since at least late May, there have been heat waves in New England, the Southwest and California Central Valley, wildfires in New Mexico, a tropical storm form of the coast of Florida, and who can forget the recent incredible image of images of destructive flooding in Yosemite National Park. So, with that danger season framing in mind, let's talk about what onerated climate change means for extreme heat in the near future. Projections of how heat is likely to change because of global warming typically are done with just temperature, but humidity is a very important part of the story, as it affects our experience of heat. So, we saw a need for projections of how extreme heat is likely to change in terms that US residents are most familiar with the heat index, which includes humidity and is what the National Weather Service uses to issue heat advisory alerts. For our killer, for our 2019 killer heat work, we developed projections of how heat index values are likely to change across the US, using extremely fine resolution climate models. If you imagine a grid being plopped over the US, each box would measure two and a half by two and a half miles wide. We calculated the daily maximum heat index for the 21st century for three future emission scenarios of slow action and no action to reduce emissions, and a rapid emissions reduction scenario similar to that contemplated in the Paris Agreement. We looked at the number of days in an average year in which heat index values were above a few different thresholds that are dangerous to various groups of people. 90 Fahrenheit above 100 Fahrenheit and 105. And off the charts, heat index, where we could not be reliably calculated due to exceedances in both the relative humidity and the maximum daily temperature. We found that by mid-century nationwide, if we fail to reduce global heat trapping emissions, the number of days with a heat index above 105 would double, and the number of days above 105 would quadruple. To give you some examples, Austin, Texas has experienced historically on average five days with a heat index of 105 for higher. But by mid-century, with no action on climate change, it could experience 59 days, so nearly two months' worth of really dangerous heat conditions. Oklahoma City has experienced four such days, could experience 43 by year on average by mid-century. Raleigh, North Carolina has experienced three or so historically, and could experience 26 by year by mid-century. We developed data at the congressional district level for 433 congressional districts, and these are available in English and Spanish in the form of fact sheets. Using our district fact sheet map, which will be a link provided, users can find where they live on the map, click on the area, and see a pop-up window and download the fact sheet for the congressional district. The fact sheet is a front and back overview of our report findings, policy solutions, and each one has a snapshot of the findings for that district. Here we can see an example for Salt Lake City, which shows that the Uda Second District is totally had 11 days on average of temperatures above 90. And if we don't meet the goals of Paris, that is, if we don't take rapid action on climate, we'll have more than one month, 42 days or so, on average, above 90. So definitely a high increase in extreme and high heat conditions. Now turn over to the impacts on workers. What can these levels of heat mean for the ability of outdoor workers to earn wages? We followed up our killer heat foundational work with an analysis we call too hot to work. We estimated outdoor workers' workdays and earnings at risk in the future from climate change, using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations on reducing outdoor work based on temperature and humidity conditions. There are 32 million outdoor workers in the U.S., from construction workers to farm workers, to emergency responders, who regularly face a brutal choice, risk their health by enduring dangerous exposure to heat, or risk their jobs by staying home. And these dangers are real. Maria Isabel Vázquez-Cilmenes, on the portrait that one of her loved ones is holding in the picture on the bottom left of this image, is one among many outdoor workers who have died from heat exhaustion due to lack of protections. And like Dr. Keith said, these are entirely preventable of deaths. In our report, we also found that between now and mid-century, outdoor workers' exposure to extreme heat would quadruple, risking $55.4 billion in annual earnings nationwide. By mid-century, outdoor workers' exposure to extreme heat would quadruple. We also found disproportionate impacts on workers of color. The average outdoor worker risked losing more than $1,700 in annual earnings. The workers in the 10 hardest heat counties risked losing nearly $7,000 per year on average. Outdoor workers in construction and extraction occupations are projected to face the highest total earnings at risk at about $14.4 billion annually, totaled by dosing installation, maintenance, and repair occupations at nearly $10.8 billion annually. And going back to the inequity of distribution of these impacts, we also found that Black, African-American, Hispanic, and Latino people that hold more than 40% of outdoor jobs despite comprising less than one-third of the overall U.S. population suggest that these workers would disproportionately bear the brunt of these changes. I'll talk about this in a minute, so I'll jump over here. So there are a few opportunities for action. There are some actions that are happening at the federal and local levels. My co-presenters discussed some of these, but at the federal level, at the Department of Labor, OSHA just announced and started the process for developing protections that employers must follow, such as implementing water, rest, shade training, and acclimatization procedures for newer returning employees. There is the Senator Marquis Heat Illness and Deaths Act to prevent some of these deaths as well. There's also the State Cool Act that Congresswoman Coleman discussed in her intro remarks, which is a package of proposals for addressing the increased threat of heat emergencies by improving how we study, react to and mitigate extreme heat. And there's the Asuncion Valdivia bill introduced by Rev Grijalba, which seeks similar protections to those in the OSHA national emphasis program on heat illness, again protections like shade, water, training for managers and employees to recognize heat stroke symptoms. And I'm also excited to see that at the local or state level, like it was discussed earlier, there is some action. Oregon has created worker protections measured similar to the recent ones mentioned that are being done by OSHA. And a few cities like Miami, Los Angeles and Phoenix have created offices to respond to immediate heat like Dr. Ladd mentioned. I will stop there. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to join us today. I look forward to the Q&A. I know there was a lot of information here, so I'll be more than happy to dive in a little bit more. Thanks. Thanks, Juan. And I appreciate you joining us today to share your insights and expertise and perspectives on the issues. Thank you very much. We are going to do our Q&A a little bit differently today, and that is because we are joined by another special guest. Kurt Schickman is the director of Extreme Heat Initiatives at the Atlantic Council's Adrian Arst Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. Previously, Kurt was the executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance, which he launched in 2011 and built into a global network of over 70 cities implementing passive cooling solutions to combat rising urban heat. He's led projects for the World Bank, the Department of Energy, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum and the Clean Energy Ministerial. Kurt is the director of Primer for Cool Cities, reducing excessive urban heat, a World Bank publication. And a special note, Kurt is the newest member of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute's Board of Directors. So, Kurt, welcome to our briefing today. You're going to lead us through the questions and answers. And I think at this time it probably makes sense for Ladd and Sonal and Juan to turn their videos on. Take it away, Kurt. It's great to see you. Great, thanks very much, Dan, and thanks for the kind introduction. And thank you, Juan, Ladd and Sonal, for all your work over many years on this issue of heat and for these presentations today. I think it's more important than ever that this information gets out to as many people as possible so we can take appropriate action. So thanks again, not just for today, but for all the years of great work that you all have done. I guess I want to start with where Juan ended and also reflect on the points raised by both Sonal and Ladd regarding just a broad set of challenges that are now exacerbating. They're now exacerbated by rising temperatures and that affect people's ability to survive the heat and looking at existing federal programs. What existing federal programs are out there that can help communities build resilience to heat or which could be modified or enhanced to do that. And I'm happy to start with any one of you, but maybe I'll ask Sonal to kick us off if that's okay. Sure, yeah. There's a number of federal programs. I would say one of the biggest ones we focus on is the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. That's run by HHS and it is a huge part of funding for assisting people with energy needs. And it works differently in different states, as I'm sure a lot of our viewers know. However, in some states it doesn't subsidize cooling bills and that is the biggest gap that we see in New York State. That right now all that the program does is it provides a value of up to $800 for an AC unit once every five years. So it's not exactly helping people be protected against extreme heat. And what we want to see is that funding mechanism upgraded both from the federal side and then individual states to actually react to a changing climate, which we have not seen really happen at enough of a pace in New York State. So that's a big one. And then HUD has a big climate action plan that we think is promising in terms of having metrics, goals around energy efficiency in homes, which is really important for extreme heat mitigation. However, we want to see it go farther. We particularly want to see a lot more funding going to low-income housing, public housing that really needs funding to be better maintained and deal with long history of disinvestment or non-investment that has led to a moment today where there are more vulnerable from extreme heat. And then lastly, all of the funding from the bipartisan infrastructure bill. We are really, really pushing for Build Back Better. We think there's a lot in there that's really important. We really just need to better react to climate change both for that resilience piece and for that adaptation piece as well. So those are some of the big ones. I'd like to add to what Sonal said that there's the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is ministered by the Department of Energy. I'm not exactly sure if there's some interaction there with HUD, as you mentioned. But I think the broader problem is that as Sonal said earlier in her presentation, the impacts and the structural barriers for people to become resilient against heat are multiple. So they're structural. They're socio-economic and racial. And programs by virtue of the way that federal government works, it's focused very narrowly on specific things and assets like housing, like the AC bill, the power bill, and so on. Whereas there is a need for a broader understanding of climate impacts with large and how existing socio-economic and racial disparities are being exacerbated by climate impacts and are making it more difficult for people to be able to put food on the table and stay safe. Yeah, like I said in my presentation at the end, NYHIS is really important because it's an interagency group and kind of provides the cooperation that we want to see for a whole of government approach. So again, NYHIS is really important to continue support, but it just doesn't have the resources again right now to support the 19,000 communities across the country. I've been working on heat for what feels like a long time now. And every year the interest has been increasing, which has been a good thing. It's been NOAA, CDC, and EPA have all had really strong historic roles addressing heat and I want to applaud the work that they've been doing. EPA has a heat island reduction program, which has been running for longer than anyone else has had heat island related resources for local communities. There's NOAA with the National Weather Service. Those offices are so critical. Like Zeno was mentioning, providing those early warnings for their local communities. And then CDC has a number of different programs, obviously. BRACE is one of them, Building Resilience Against Climate Effects, which is helping connect climate change to public health departments. But I think outside of those historic places where heat has been focused on, every single federal agency needs to integrate thinking about heat. And you can imagine Department of Labor based on what one was talking about needs to really take more seriously. Department of Education, you know, we know that heat affects learning outcomes and that many schools are just physically too hot for students to be in as summers increase. Department of Education needs to address heat. Heat's a national security risk, so it's Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. So, you know, I could go down the list of every single federal agency, but we need a whole of government approach to really address heat as a national risk. Great. That's fantastic. Such a wide variety of opportunities there to make a difference in these programs and have it do something good for heat. I'm going to turn, actually, to something you said in your presentation, and we'll hear from everybody here. But you raised the point about establishing metrics for success for these programs around heat resilience and how critical that is. And I really couldn't agree more. And so I wonder, because thinking about your presentation, looking at, I'm thinking of that bubble, the different reactions people have to the issue of environmental justice and heat, and how many different ways we can approach that and want your presentation as well and in this space around worker safety. There's so many different metrics we could choose or, or, you know, clouds of metrics we could choose. And so I wonder if you all have some thoughts on how communities and cities and states or the federal government to go about making decisions on what to track and evaluate when it comes to, to evaluating success in these programs, and happy to start with anybody who wants to jump in first. And I would say that a good metric to start, or a good principle to start developing metrics will be to what extent the programs address existing historical and contemporary inequities, right. So we have seen in a, in a, in a world where you have limited resources, you need to have some criteria to prioritize what sort of resources, you're going to deploy it could be social resources will be actual capital invest capital investments projects of retrofitted buildings weatherized buildings and vegetation, a beetle reduction and so on. There needs to be a criteria that should be socially and equitably based. And there's plenty of data to guide to guide that that's something that I'm very happy to see for example at the local level, the city of Phoenix has announced that they will develop these kind of corridors along corridors of vegetation which is a very adequate measure for a hot grid at city like Phoenix. The point is that, which may not work everywhere right but the point is that doing that based on vulnerable on population vulnerability to heat criteria based on the multiple studies that have been conducted including some by myself and my colleagues and others to guide the placement of those of those of those resources base to get the best bank for the book, because equality and equity are not the same thing. If you provide blanket resources to blanket the whole city or a whole region with resources then you are going to be reproducing the same inequities that already exists, because not everybody needs the same amount the same amount of resources because they can drive a some people can drive on their condition car to in their condition office and work instead of writing a boss on the back of a pickup truck to work in a landscaping job. So an equity equity social equity. And we just had one challenge for communities that are trying to address heat risk for maybe the first time, which is honestly most communities in the United States still at this point is just there's a lack of information and a lack of resources to obtain that information. And again, this is a new risk that's being considered and so we just don't have a history of collecting the correct information the transparent information connected to the goals that we have. One example that's an easy one because people think if he related deaths with heat is that was mentioned by sonal leave and I think is how do we, how do we categorize heat deaths and, you know, I'm fortunate here in Arizona words historically been hot and we have a history of doing a really sort of collecting heat related deaths and illnesses. They probably, I would say the best of the country right just because we have that history, but there's many states that just don't have that same history. And so when a death occurs like was mentioned before, it's not tagged as a key related that that's just tagged as heart disease or heart attack or, you know, pulmonary disease and so I think, you know, that's that's something that the federal government can help with because some of those he deaths are recorded first at the county level that goes up to the state level and and just even getting a better idea of where we're actually at. We know that he deaths and he illnesses are vastly underreported, even with the good work that's being done right now so so that's one example, you know urban planners may be more interested in percent of treat canopy cover in their cities that will not be one goal for the city because I guarantee with the mega drought in the Southwest, our urban forestry goals are going to be a little bit different than New York City or Chicago or Portland right and so I think I think a lot of these goals will have to be place specific and developed by the local communities, but the ability to access the information needed to set those goals and to understand how we're doing an addressing heat is something that the federal government can really help support local communities with. Thank you both very much. I want to turn to a question around scale which always means a question around funding and financing. And I think we're seeing a number of innovative ways to open up financing for heat mitigation resilience and I'm thinking for example, you know, LA's climate resolves work on to recognize the economic value of broader greenhouse gas and mitigation benefits from cool roots for I'm wondering if the three of you are seeing any public private or even hybrid opportunities to finance and fund this work at scale and what could be done by policymakers that may be on this call to help accelerate funding and financing in this space. I guess I can start with what I ended my last comment with, which was build back better. That's definitely definitely big number one for us. We need funding for long term fixes to this problem we need emergency funding yes, but long term is what we need what we're looking at. We need to equip people with the tools to be able to combat rising heat in the in over many, many, many years and protect their health and we need funding to make sure that we don't have polluted cities and therefore more at risk people for heat. Higher asthma means you don't want to walk down the street on a really hot day. We hear that from our members all the time. So how do we prevent these long term risks that lead to extreme heat deaths, and how do we create long term fixes to extreme heat which is efficient cooling and renewable energy. In the smaller scale we really need federal funding that's coming from bipartisan infrastructure act and you know all the various funding sources that have come over the past couple of years to be going to programs like expanding like he so states can cover utility bills for low income people in the summertime. We want to see funding go to the weatherization assistance program more of that to go to WAP as well. And we want to see both of them really be scaling up things like heat pump installations and low income housing because that's something that's absolutely unaffordable for people at this point in time. So those are some of the big pools that we are looking at and we really highly recommend anyone in their states to be looking at sources of funding for those kinds of solutions. Yeah, I definitely agree with what Sonal said those those two particular programs, you know, like he and and the weather weatherization assistance program have been chronically underfunded for a long time. And even even even doing the emergency funding that was given by Congress doing COVID, there was there was there were huge there were huge sums of money put into those part to go into those programs but they were not really enough for the need, you know they were just covering the gap that has been widening over the last year over the previous years. So definitely that that to build back better as well and to try to implement to make good on the justice for the commitments that the administration has. We, and this is what communities have said also in the context of the White House climate and economic justice screening tool to help guide those investments in their in their beta version that there need to be mechanisms and clear guidance for communities to be able to apply for those funds and obtain those funds in ways that are accurate. And then it becomes unclear how how effective these efforts are going to be. Yeah, I would do so for public investments and there are examples of many local communities starting to invest serious money into heat mitigation. Often it comes with the co benefits of like green stormwater infrastructure and forestry also reduces flood risk and so kind of looking for those co benefits where they can right here in Tucson. The city of Tucson has approved 225 million dollar bond which very much had heat at the forefront it was a parks bond and a green connections bond with the idea of cool corridors and increasing urban forestry where it's strategically placed and where we can utilize rainwater resources as city of Tucson Marine Council also passed a utility fee that has a low income equity components of the lower income households don't have to pay it but that also funds more public investment into green stormwater infrastructure as part of the city and the Tucson waters, one water approach, which has the co benefits again of heat and water resources. And then again, we have those three examples of those communities that have appointed chief heat officers are developed in Phoenix that office of heat response and mitigation, I would caution though. A lot of our focus always goes to like what new money is needed to address this risk and we're obviously living in a time that there's not a lot of new money floating around and it's really hard to obtain right and so, again, three chief heat officer type positions are not going to be 15,000 cities in the United States and towns. So we need to figure out other ways of reorganizing our institutions and processes that address heat without adding additional resource burdens on a lot of communities. And one one example as a planner that I'll point to is, we approve new development every single day right on the shape of our future cities is being decided and every rezoning every plan. Every development that gets approved right each of those can either increase the urban heat effect or decrease it. And so we need to just consider heat as a as a climate risk like we do with flood and wildfire, and just integrated into our daily decision making processes similarly, we have millions of dollars already going out for Department of Transportation infrastructure projects, even without build back better right. So much of those should be considering the heat equity kind of components of it so is are those new roadways decreasing heat or increasing heat, are those new transportation systems equitable, and available to all modes of transportation or, you know, does it force people into automobiles that, you know, exacerbate climate change and increase the urban effect to so they think there's a lot of existing things that we need to also look at and not just kind of pin all of our hopes on silver bullets for public investments. In our surveys I found that a lot of communities are kind of gravitating towards thinking that urban forestry and cool roofs and cooling centers are kind of like the three things that will save our cities from heat. And those are three important components but we have to we have to think holistically about everything that cities are actually doing and not just look for silver bullet to solve all of our problems. Great points all. I don't want to be a hog here so I'm going to turn it back over to Dan to see if he has any questions to add. Yeah, I have a, I actually have an audience question to, but you know, to lad point sounds like we need some metrics to help guide, you know, repurposing some of those existing programs for, you know, addressing these heat effects. I'm going to interject an audience question here because I think it's a useful follow up to some points that one and so on have been making about the weatherization and life weatherization systems program and life. And so I'm happy to hear your your opinions on this and lad please feel free to jump in to and same with you Kurt but could you give some examples of how weatherization program or lie he specifically help mitigate heat effects I think someone in our audience may be thinking of them as maybe programs that are maybe when you think of weatherization you think of cold weather. And certainly why he, you know, it's heating assistance program. But one and so do you have any suggestions or do you have any comments about how specifically states are putting weatherization enlightened dollars into use to help mitigate extremely. I'd like to hear from so now because I know she has worked on that local in New York City. I mean for for like he, the cooling assistance portion of the program is only about 4% of the budget for New York State. And I think you can go much, much higher than maybe it's to your 20% of like he budget can go to cooling for a state and states get to kind of determine that formula within their states. In New York they've determined that 4% of the funding goes to the cooling assistance program that program specifically pays for someone who is income qualified to get an AC. But that's only every five years for them. And recently the improvements that they made was that now there's no medical documentation required to get an AC because that was frankly ridiculous. And it does also. Now if you are on a receiving any kind of federal housing subsidy, or on a kind of voucher you can also now receive that benefit as well which was previously not a benefit so all of our public housing residents previously we're not able to be a part of the program. And that has now changed so there's been a couple improvements but still it doesn't really get at the main need that people have which is paying for their summer utility costs because summer utility bills tend to be 20% 30% higher. And ConEd is our utility provider in New York State has decided to propose yet another rate hike. Even though people are in more than we have a more than $1.4 billion in utility debt in New York State. And so that is something that I, that is a similar problem across the US. And so, for that program, if you are not in New York State, you can go. You can find where your how your state allocates the cooling assistance program and a advocate from HHS and the federal government to be putting more money into the cooling program. But you also have to be advocating the federal representatives as I understand it need to also be advocating for their own state to get pools of funding for the program, because it is not allocated. Every state doesn't get even funding. And then lastly working with your governor and your state representatives to create a formula for that funding that reflects actual need of people in your state. So those are, that's that's sort of how it works out and for the weatherization assistance program. It really is helpful for building owners, if you are an area representing a high number of renters it doesn't become as helpful. You have the problem of the split incentive where it's really building owners that want to see their buildings upgraded that apply for that program and you don't really see the benefits accrue to the renters themselves. So that program is really good for building owners and we want to see it expanded because we need buildings to be improved, but it doesn't it doesn't help the the rental market as much. I think I think I think I think that what's not saying is indicative of how slow has, you know, have, have institutions been to recognize extreme heat as a problem right only 4% is dedicated to extreme heat, at least in the, not sure if it's national or if that's in the way that the state of New York chooses to do that, which is, which speaks to me that there is, there's attention and there should be a better balance between localities being able to implement their solutions and have discretion but also there should be national level protections to avoid this hodgepodge of implementations of programs like people programs like like the weather station assistance program that is leaving a lot of people in the large, basically. Thanks for that. I appreciate it. I also wanted to ask a question. So you were said something to the effect of long term fixes are what we need. We can't treat this, you know, emergency funding has a role to play emergency responses a role to play but these are long term fixes that require, you know, sort of a long term vision for transformation, but it keep policy and action at least the current state of it as I sort of been learning seems to separate preparedness and emergency response from sort of those longer term transformation issues. I'm curious to maybe where that comes from what the root of that is or what the cause of that is and, you know, how could we better align emergency preparedness and emergency response and those long term fixes so that we're making progress on both fronts, you know, at the same time and so on since I sort of stole your words, maybe I'll ask you to go first and then perhaps you're from lab and from one. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think I'll caveat with an extra cynical today. So I do feel like it does come a lot down to political will in terms of where a lot of this funding goes and what gets mobilized in places. And that doesn't always reflect actual public health need. In fact, it often does not. So that's the overarching answer in my own opinion. I do think you need both I think the long what's difficult about long term is that it requires a lot more investment for a lot more people. And it's harder to achieve and I think that that's not always the direction that legislators go in. But I do think that's what we need in terms of climate mitigation like not just for extreme heat but for discussions around climate change overall, we need to be moving off our fossil fuels we need to be reducing emissions. And if we're working on that we are in part addressing a huge problem when it comes to extreme heat. So, you know, weatherizing homes making homes energy efficient, putting cooling infrastructure in schools for example. And that that's considered these long term ideas and, you know, building tree canopy is very long term it takes a long time for trees to grow. You know, all of that is long term solutions that that have really high impact, they just take time and more money. Because of the emergency response it's so so so critical because we have people dying every single day from extreme heat, we need to be protecting people immediately, as much as we are working on how do we address the climate crisis. And that is where we advocate for air conditioning distribution and we advocate for better communications around heat safety and warning systems. That is something that also is more achievable on hyper local level, which I think is also a difference in terms of capability neighborhoods can work on these things. Sometimes it's not stuff, the long term sometimes are things that needs state and federal mobilization to do so I think that's also part of why you see kind of a difference in, in how the short term planning moves and the long term moves. Yeah, I would just add that scientists named Luke Howard in London actually discovered the urban heat island effect back in 1833. So this is nothing new we've known about this for over 200 years almost right. So I mean, despite that fact like I mentioned before, we just don't have the governance structures in place like we do for floods, droughts wildfires sea level rise even. So that's that's really the stem of why all of our disciplines and departments at all levels of government have kind of historically been maybe addressing heat just a little bit but kind of in their own silos. It's really only been the last decade, I would say like honestly the last decade that certain areas that have been experiencing more of that heat have started to bridge some of those gaps and say, like we can address heat and our silos we have to start to bridge and make those connection points. So one way for local communities to make those connection points as to perhaps hire chief heat officer or create a new office for it. Like I mentioned that's not possible in most communities in the United States due to lack of resources. So there's other options we have some communities coming together and creating task forces for heat where the public health person and the planner and the hazard mitigation planner and the emergency manager meet with the National Weather Service Office and kind of talk about what they're doing with the resources that they have and how are they thinking about heat and what the problems actually are. And so I think it's going to look very diverse across the country. But it will require new structures and kind of new processes, and it will take a while to figure out what's kind of appropriate at which level of government. And again, it'll require the federal government and state governments to really support those efforts going forward so that the smaller communities aren't left behind. And this is the federal government just released a report a while back in April that showed that the proportion of rural community members that are hospitalized for heat illness is actually much higher than the proportion of urban residents that are hospitalized or treated for heat illness. So of course, more of our nation lives in cities, so that number is greater overall, but we're having higher rates of heat illness in rural areas and I just want to point that out because we think of heat as a city problem, and it's truly not heat affects cities and I could believe like we've been discussing, but it's a it's a problem for everyone in the entire country. And I think the engagement that that that lab is proposing absolutely also needs, you know, the local level needs the engagement needs involvement of communities right pre disaster during disaster post disaster. That is, that is something that is not giving enough attention, and especially the inclusion of community members in a, in a, in a real honest way, whereby we need to broaden the definition of what an expert is is not just people with master's and PhDs in policy and science and it's also communities who know and understand their own environmental social problems, because they have lived they have lived through them, and they continue to do through them and they have plenty of solutions. And so I think that is a scenic one of doing of creating receiving tech we cannot exist without it. Sorry one that's a fantastic point and I maybe make a quick observation have everyone's thoughts on this, and that is, you know, this issue is increasingly important and it touches so many different or different populations and organizations and different, you know, disciplines and so on. And maybe because of that. We just don't really speak with one voice, or even a unified or coordinated voice on heat, whereas even other aspects of the climate challenge are able to do that and mobilize in the in state houses and in Congress and elsewhere to actually make sort of scale change we need. So first I don't know if you agree with that but I'd be really curious on, you know, how we can do a better job as a community of people focus on this issue, both because we have to because it affects our lives, or because it's our chosen professions. How do we do a better job of mobilizing this community of folks to start to make the change we were all talking about that we need. I'll offer off, I'll offer up an example that might be a template for appropriate for some places and then I think Sonal has some great examples of how you mobilize local communities which one was just mentioning is so critical to as far as kind of the experts decision maker level here in Arizona in April we just held our sixth annual Arizona extreme heat workshop, which is hosted by the National Weather Service Office, hosted by the Arizona Department of Health Services and University of Arizona and Arizona State University, and is a meeting place once a year for all of us to come and discuss extreme heat related issues and is one of those connection points I was talking about where those traditionally siloed disciplines are coming together so you know, we have different topics that we discuss this year this year we focused on people experiencing homelessness and heat, but in the past we've talked about emergency management responses, things like that and so, so I think just bridging those divides and creating this connection points whether it's a heat workshop like that or, you know, a local workshop or local task force is really important and anything like one said, you know, that's at the decision maker level so we had, you know, mostly it was open to the public but mostly, you know, folks that are employed at local government or the state government or academics, and we had some elected officials and the media was there too. But I think we need to also do a better job of engaging the public on heat, and I would say again, not just engaging them we actually need to listen to them and make sure that they can have access to voting and that they can participate in their democracy at the same level that everyone else is because that's where we're going to see real change. I agree, I mean, I think we have to realize that there's communities in the Southwest that I've worked with, and when I started working with them in extreme issues related to urban heat islands and extreme heat. They did not recognize for a number of different reasons they did, I'm sorry, they didn't recognize it didn't prioritize extreme heat in the way that they do now, and it's could be because it hadn't turned so such a big problem back then compared to other issues remember that communities are facing, especially low income communities of color facing multiple simultaneous hazards at the same time. They're dealing with many, many different things and in their own quality of life plan. They were more concerned about graffiti and crime and so I actually had asked the police to remove trees in the 80s because there were dropping trees being done behind Tricover and so on or other sorts of activities. So, so recognizing that communities are increasingly seeing these impacts is critical to be able to engage with communities and bring them to the table. I mean, I have to give a shout out to other organizations. Of course we act in New York City and in other places Nature Conservancy for example has been doing a lot of work in this space in Arizona. The Civil Phoenix has partnered with American Forests to develop some of these vulnerability criteria for three kind of these. So, so there's a large body of different experts, advocates, policymakers that are recognizing this is a problem that are looking at developing solutions. Yeah, no, I agree with everything that in one have said and I think I think it is critical to engage the public in extreme heat for, I guess, like two reasons that have sort of already been said but one is because engaging people means they're engaging in their their own agency and capacity to fight for any kinds of issues that they want to fight for you learn how to work on one you learn how to work on many. And that also means that they become advocates of the solutions that they want to see in their community as experts of their community and that's something that we've had happen in Harlem. When we ask people in Harlem with issues are with extreme heat to large points very different than what people might say in Arizona, or a specific part of Arizona, versus, you know, so that that is really important. And then secondly, the more you engage in an issue and solution it the more you know about it and more you're able to actually just know how to protect yourself and be aware. So engaging communities is not just about bringing them into the advocacy space and solutioning but also it does just generally increase understanding and awareness of how to react to an extreme heat event. That's really helpful. I know a couple times and, but I wonder just in a quick reflection from each of you just ending on perhaps a hopeful note. If there are some examples from communities or groups that you're working with of really innovative ways to to actually address heat resilience and mitigation that you'd like to highlight. What I would throw out there just as for example under one roof in San Antonio, and some of the work they've done to extend weatherization to improve the whole roof system and income qualified buildings to actually deliver substantial energy benefits in homes that have air conditioning and substantial thermal comfort in homes that don't or can't run their air conditioners, and the University of Texas at San Antonio has some great research on that program over the course of a couple years. I don't know if that went out but I'd be curious others, any ones you'd like to point out. Well, I'd say that some of the, some of the engagements have been doing Southwest in Phoenix have involved communities in the climate action in the context of the climate action plan that the city is carrying out that has a strong heat component as as last said, the heat equity office and public stakeholder process around that has a strong science component with actual heat health scientists at the helm of that, of that, our friend and colleague, David Dula. Also, that sort of like, like that said earlier in this presentation, some of these efforts have been spearheaded in the context of climate action plans but there are other contexts for example, a in the specific case of the community I work with in Phoenix that has included heat of safety and mitigation urban mitigation within their quality of life plan which includes transit development economic opportunities. Economic development within the community, which is a historically low income community of color. So, I'm so engaging in those spaces where communities are seeing holistically that extreme heat protections resilience permit a heat island mitigation are a are a broader are our component of a broader quality of life planning human health and well being. I think that's a key place where post scientist policy advocates and climate change advocates can insert ourselves and bring in our our skills our knowledge to in service of those communities. Yeah, so for the planning for urban heat resilience book I presented on earlier. So, we look all across the country kind of on top of the research we've done to find some of those good diverse examples. It's either a question I get asked a lot by journalists is what city is doing a perfect job at heat and the honest answer is, it's a very fragmented landscape and there's no one in the entire world that's really addressing heat perfectly or even holistically But we are getting so much closer and so that's my kind of optimistic take is we've seen you chief heat officers appointed we've seen more cities dedicate resources and kind of attention to heat so in the last couple of years it's been increasing, certainly after the Pacific Northwest heat wave of last year, the attention to heat skyrocketed even in historically cooler places. You know, a couple of examples of cities that have recently been doing interesting things. The city of Boston just released a heat resilient solutions for Boston report which is really holistic. I would urge cities that are interested in kind of looking at a heat plan that covers both heat mitigation and heat management to look at Boston. You know, Baltimore City has has done a code read program for years now and that's been a really good way to kind of activate services for cooling centers and people experiencing homelessness and check ins with adverse populations of Baltimore is going to look out for that one. And of course Arizona since we've historically dealt with heat like one was mentioning, you know we have our annual extreme heat workshop. We have the Arizona heat relief network that helps with cooling centers. So I think there's a lot of kind of good examples of coordination from Arizona as well. So, but no, no perfect example yet but many exciting examples of innovation that are starting up. So from New York City, the Department of Health run with in conjunction with the mayor's offices and Department of Aging they run New York City's be a buddy program, which I think is nice to point out it is a program that essentially organizes neighborhoods to create a communication system with each other to check on each other on a heat wave day, or now it can really be they've set it up it could be any moment they need to check on each other. So that's something that's been piloted in and it's led by community based groups and a couple neighborhoods in New York City, and it's found to be quite successful and is something that the city hopefully will be expanding into other neighborhoods with leadership from from community based organizations. And it's a great way to just make sure that people are safe in that sort of emergency response vein on a heat extreme heat day. So that's a fantastic program and engaging the, you know, trusted sources to provide, you know, services to people it's a great one I'd love to see replicated. Well, I want to throw it to Dan to take us home but I want to just add a personal thanks to each of you for your work and for sharing your insights with us today. I really appreciate it and over to you Dan. Thank you Kurt and thanks to you for helping us navigate a really interesting discussion with our three excellent panelists today I'm pretty sure Kurt will ask you back. You've acquitted yourself pretty well as a co moderator at an ESI event so you're joining the ranks of Rosina beer bomb and Raya Salter and other ES and Dick Oddinger other ESI board members who made some recent appearances in our briefings so thanks so much for joining us. We're being on a board of directors to its big help. Lad, zonal and one. Like Kurt said thank you so much for joining us today, really interesting presentations and if anyone would like to go back and revisit the presentations, you can watch the web, web, archived webcast which is available on our website and also review. All of the presentation materials and some of the additional resources that our panelists have our audience so thanks so much for being great panelists. Like to say a special thanks to Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman and her staff for making her participation today possible it means a lot to have her voice among our panelists today. I'd like to take a moment to say thank you to ESI staff who pull these briefings off. That's Dan O'Brien, Omri Emma Allison Anna and Savannah. And this is the first briefing of Molly, Brenda more who's our new policy associates so she's joining us behind the scenes today for her first briefing, and also special shout out to Jonathan hers was one of our policy fellows for writing the great article, the q amp a article about CVC. So thanks, Jonathan for your contributions today to. We also have four fabulous summer interns Christina Stephanie Abbey and Nathan so thanks to all of their help. My colleague Dan O'Brien is just put a slide up. This is a link to our survey. If folks in our audience have a moment to take our survey it means a lot we read every response. Like issues audio problems video problems if the closed captioning wasn't working properly or you have ideas for future briefings, please let us know what you think it like I said it really does mean a lot. We are a couple minutes over sorry for that, but I think it was well worth it so thanks again to our panelists thanks to Kurt thanks to Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman. Thanks to everyone who joined us today. I wish everyone a very happy weekend. We'll see you next Wednesday for offshore wind energy. Thanks so much.