Global warming doesn’t just affect marginalized groups. Record levels of hot days and tropical nights are putting a strain on a large part of society. But measures face hurdles.
His name is Michel. The man is 1.75 meters tall, weighs 75 kilos, is around 35 years old, is sporty – and determines when the heat stress is in the green, yellow, orange or red range on hot summer days. The weather services in Germany and Austria base their decision on whether to issue a heat warning or not. The strange thing is that Michel doesn’t even exist. He is just an assumption. A role model for a person’s heat balance. Its dimensions serve as a basis for general calculations of heat stress and cold stress. “And the dog is buried there,” says Marlies Kriegler, head of the Styria regional office of Geosphere Austria.
The actual feeling of heat and its physical and psychological consequences are highly individual. The state heat protection plan that has existed since 2017, the heat protection ordinance derived from it last year and various warning services via email, SMS or WhatsApp – together with average values of the actual measured maximum daily temperature and the perceived temperature – remain a (necessary) generalized approximation. Not the only blur.
Geosphere Austria
»Every apartment has a different risk.«
Marlies Kriegler,
Geosphere Austria
“If you look at when a warning is given in a European comparison, it is unfortunately not very homogeneous,” says Kriegler: In Germany, the perceived temperature is measured in the early afternoon. In both England and France the maximum temperature is taken as a parameter, but when it comes to the minimum there is a different feeling.
“The French ignore the heat when the temperature falls below 20 degrees at night and it is therefore not a tropical night,” said Kriegler at the recent Styrian “Climate and Energy Forum” of the Climate Change Center Austria (CCCA) in Graz. In Great Britain, on the other hand, we speak of a heat wave when the nights are warmer than 15 degrees. In Switzerland, however, no one-time measured value is used as the basis for evaluation, but rather a sliding arithmetic mean taken every ten minutes. Kriegler could imagine a switch to the federal methodology for Austria. Whether a warning is issued in this country is currently determined by a group of experts from various specialist areas that meets twice a week as part of the Multi-Hazard Advice Service. With a view to the number of warnings sent to cell phones in relation to the actual threat situation, Kriegler speaks of a “learning-by-doing process”: “We are feeling our way.”
The risk classification in the case of extreme heat also remains complex and highly dynamic. “Every apartment – whether in the attic or in the basement – has a different risk, every person who lives in a building has an individual risk, every person can be climate vulnerable at some point in their life, for example a young, healthy woman who is heavily pregnant in July or an athletic man who sits in a wheelchair for a short time because of a broken leg,” puts Daniela Haluza, environmental medicine specialist at the Center for Public Health at Med-Uni Vienna, into perspective. In addition, there are multiple burdens that can be decisive. “It’s not always just old people or always children, it’s more about overlaps between vulnerability and socioeconomic status and gender,” says Gabriel Bachner from the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change in the Graz Unit, referring to partial results of a research project that examined the distribution of climate risks in society.
Overall, the researchers can distill individual risk profiles: people affected by poverty, single parents, single people, migrants, homeless people and urban heat islands, but also rural peripheral areas. “Around a quarter to a fifth of the population is currently considered to be at acute risk,” quantifies Bachner. “Scaled towards the worst-case scenario with regard to demographic developments and increasing global warming, two thirds of the population will slip into the high-risk area,” he warns: “This will then no longer be a fringe group issue.”
The researchers’ conclusion: “Income is a very important indicator of vulnerability. But simply ‘pouring in’ more money is often not fair and does not solve the problem in the long term,” Bachner points out. Rather, care must be taken to “strengthen the resilience of society, but also of individuals.”
