“At the time there was an incredible lack of awareness and understanding around the mounting and multifaceted threat caused by a warming planet and by extreme heat,” says Mary McBryde, who now serves as director of investment and innovation at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

In 2021, the think tank made adapting to extreme heat its main priority. Since then, the center has advocated for categorizing and naming heat waves, just as hurricanes and wildfires are named, to better convey their risks. Its Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance brings together experts in public health, disaster response, public infrastructure, and various other disciplines to help urban areas find solutions for various heat-related challenges across the world. It’s also helping to test efforts like a new financial support program for tens of thousands of self-employed women in India so they don’t have to choose between income and unsafe working conditions.

Scorching temperatures pose health and economic risks to people around the world, particularly in urban areas where dense buildings, dark pavement, and lack of green space trap and emit heat. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on average, heat has been the number-one weather-related killer in the United States over the last 30 years. Extreme heat has a disproportionate effect on residents of low-income areas, the elderly, and outdoor workers.

July 2023 was the hottest month on record, and the warmest eight years have all occurred since 2015. Scientists attribute the frequency and intensity of these heat waves to human-caused climate change due to rising carbon emissions.

Foundations have supported a wide range of solutions to help cities respond in the near and long term, instituting new climate adaptation and mitigation efforts as well as a new job category: chief heat officer. As the mercury continues to rise, more donors are getting involved.

Grant makers like the Barr and Kresge foundations have funded community-based efforts to help cities plan and prepare before a heat wave strikes. Environmental justice groups and community foundations are helping to raise public awareness of the stealth danger of extreme heat and educate more people to respond to heat-related illness. Climate grant makers like ClimateWorks and the Waverley Street foundations are backing efforts to adapt urban environments to reflect heat and develop new technologies to reduce the need for energy-intensive air conditioners.

The Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center is the successor of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, which launched in 2013 to help cities deal with climate change, migration, civil unrest, and other challenges. When Rockefeller dissolved that program in 2019, the foundation gave the Atlantic Council $30 million to support a new iteration of the program. Washington philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, a former lawyer and banker, gave $25 million to endow the center.

The center has provided financial, communications, and other support for nine chief heat officers on nearly every continent. These positions in cities like Miami, Athens, and Freetown, Sierra Leone, are the point-people in their local governments and broader communities, charged with creating unified strategies to be better prepared when a heat wave strikes.

Some of the positions were seeded by philanthropy but are now fully funded by local governments.

That was the case for Jane Gilbert, Miami-Dade County’s first chief heat officer, whose position was inspired by a conversation between the county’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, and the resilience center.

It helped that in 2020 the Kresge Foundation had supported a coalition of community-based organizations to conduct surveys, focus groups, and workshops in low-income Miami neighborhoods to identify people’s top climate change-related concerns, says Gilbert, who began her chief heat officer role in 2021.

“Even though we are the international poster child of risk for sea-level rise and hurricanes, those weren’t the top concerns in those communities.” Gilbert said. Extreme heat topped the list.

To develop a plan, the county held public forums with experts and local residents and commissioned research on heat-related emergency-department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. The region’s three-year plan now includes nature-based solutions like tree planting, home and apartment retrofits, expanded access to energy-efficient air conditioning units, and public education campaigns.

Unlike cities that might have a brief but dangerously intense heat wave, Miami often has months when temperatures stay above 90 degrees. May 1 through October 31 is now officially the heat season, as declared by the county mayor. Through billboards, bus advertising, and multilingual radio spots, the county has been doing more to communicate the risks of extreme heat.

Health providers, employers of outdoor workers, community-based organizations, and summer camp providers have attended educational workshops to recognize the signs of dehydration, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke and learn how to respond.

“Your neighbor, your church friend, your community organization friend may be your best first responder but also your best trusted messenger on how to take care of yourself in the heat,” Gilbert says.

Cooling Boston

In 2016, the Boston-based Barr Foundation supported an effort to assess the region’s climate risks and vulnerabilities and produced a report called Climate Ready Boston.

Even in a northern city, “the data showed us that summer heat waves are actually very harmful,” says Mariella Puerto, director of climate grantmaking at the Barr Foundation. People who live in neighborhoods with less tree cover, less cooling, poorly insulated buildings, or fewer resources to pay for higher electric bills were disproportionately affected.

Since then, the foundation has given approximately $5 million to help protect Boston-area communities from the impact of heat and extreme weather.

In 2020, the foundation launched the Covid-Safe Cooling Strategies grant program, recognizing that many of the residents who were most impacted by the pandemic also faced the uneven burden of extreme temperatures. Now in its third year, grants have supported six municipalities and 12 community-based organizations in and around Boston. Some organizations have used the funding to meet immediate needs, like purchasing and distributing energy-efficient air-conditioning units and fans or providing residents with utility-bill assistance during heat waves. Others have conducted neighborhood surveys and used the data to request additional green space from their local governments. Cities have used the funding for infrastructure like public water fountains and splash pads for residents to cool off on blistering days.

In the city of Chelsea, north of Boston, summer temperatures can rise 20 degrees above greener suburbs. With support from the Covid-Safe Cooling Strategies program, the city has worked with the environmental-justice nonprofit Green Roots to transform a block by planting trees, installing planters and porous pavers, and replacing dark asphalt with lighter concrete.

With support from another Barr Foundation grant, GreenRoots has worked with environmental health professors at Boston University to measure summer temperatures and study the impact of these adjustments to neighborhood design.

Thanks to this program, community organizations are not only more aware but also more prepared for extreme heat risks, says Mariangelí Echevarría-Ramos, climate resilience manager at the Mystic River Watershed Association, which administers the grant program along with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional association of Boston-area cities and towns.

“Even if they’re not focused on environmental justice, social-service organizations are understanding the importance of having a climate lens on all the work that they do, especially during the summer,” she says. “Every immediate need in some way may be impacted by climate change or extreme heat.”

As more grant makers home in on the threat of heat, the Barr Foundation’s Puerto cautions against prescriptive, top-down solutions. “Don’t focus on the extreme heat strategy, like planting trees,” she says. Instead, support grassroots organizations that can ask their neighbors what would be most helpful.

“Local communities are best suited to identify problems and help develop the solutions that lead to the concrete improvements,” she says.

Better Air Conditioning

To be sure, technology solutions continue to attract major support from philanthropy.

The ClimateWorks Clean Cooling Collaborative program, for example, issues roughly $10 million in grants annually toward efforts to reduce the energy required to cool buildings around the world. Grants are focused on groups working in China, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States, the four regions that are projected to contribute 75 percent of cooling-related emissions between now and 2050. The program also seeks to improve the efficiency of cooling technology. Its Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator program, launched in partnership with the energy and conservation nonprofit RMI, aims to spur the development of super-efficient room air conditioners and ensure they reach the market.

Multiple Approaches Needed

Extreme heat has been a growing concern in New York City in the decade since Hurricane Sandy, says Sonal Jessel, director of policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit based in Harlem. Since 2014, the group has received more than $900,000 from the Kresge Foundation, with grants supporting projects such as a roadmap to reduce vulnerability to climate change-related extreme heat.

This summer the group released an Extreme Heat Policy Agenda, which recommends the New York City Council increase its investment in cooling centers where residents can go for respite. It also urges the state legislature to expand access to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps provide people with the cooling infrastructure they need in their homes. The program closed early this year when it ran out of funding.

WE ACT is a member of the Smart Surfaces Coalition, which aims to expand the use of urban design with potential to cool urban areas.

The coalition recently attracted $10 million from Laurene Powell Jobs’s Waverley Street Foundation and $1.65 million from the JPB Foundation for a three-year effort to help cool 10 U.S. cities. So far, Atlanta, Baltimore, Columbia, S.C.,, Dallas, and New Orleans have signed up. Each city will receive satellite data, analysis, and mapping to help them identify where hot, dark surfaces like roofs and pavement can be resurfaced for maximum cooling effects. Cities might also opt to plant green roofs, cover roofs with bright white paint that reflects the sun, or install solar panels to help reduce energy consumption and temperatures.

Jessel urges grant makers to support advocacy as well as short-term emergency-response efforts and long-term changes to urban planning to mitigate risks.

“With extreme heat,” she says, “there’s just so many different interventions that need to happen and need different types of expertise.”