Bangkok: Heat is an immediate crisis requiring urgent action to save lives, protect livelihoods and safeguard economies, a senior UN official has said, calling for collective efforts to translate scientific knowledge into practical solutions.
Speaking to PTI Videos on the sidelines of Bangkok Climate Action Week, Ben Churchill, Director of the regional office for Asia and the Pacific at World Meteorological Organisation, highlighted the importance of turning vast knowledge on heat, rising temperatures and their impacts into action that can save lives and protect livelihoods.
“Heat is not a future problem; it’s a problem now, and it’s everybody’s business. Yet for many years it has never been anyone’s key responsibility. The forum has seen an unprecedented turnout, all wanting to find solutions and help scale them up,” Churchill said.
“My takeaway is that moments like these are when we need to come together and turn the vast knowledge we have about heat, rising temperatures, and their impacts into action that can save lives, protect livelihoods, and contribute to social and economic development,” he added.
In September, the WMO warned that the prevailing El Nino conditions over the equatorial Pacific are most likely to intensify into a very strong event in the coming months and persist through February 2027.
It said this could have substantial impacts on rainfall and temperature patterns and the associated risks of floods, drought and extreme heat.
El Nino is one of the three phases of El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) — a climate phenomenon characterised by changes in sea temperatures along the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, accompanied by fluctuations in the atmosphere overhead.
The inaugural Global Heat Forum, part of Bangkok Climate Action Week, concluded on October 9, convening nearly 700 scientists, business leaders, philanthropists, and health experts to drive immediate action and strengthen heat governance to protect global livelihoods.
James Abraham, CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), termed heat as a dual local and global issue, where a 12 per cent GDP drop for every degree of temperature rise creates massive macroeconomic impacts, even as the ultimate choices and affected lives remain profoundly micro-level.
He said, “What we need to do is get down to every ward, location, person, and sector. That is the level at which this work must be done. That’s why our focus at CEEW is on getting granular data for specific sectors, so we can drive real, targeted impact.”
Warning that the timeline of the crisis is accelerating, Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, stressed that human interventions need to be urgent, evidence-based, and backed by science.
“The key message from the forum, and from science, is that heat is coming faster than we think. It is coming in an intense form, much more frequently, for longer durations, and it is getting harder to escape as time passes. Our response is not as fast, intense or urgent as the way heat is capturing us,” Koll told PTI.
He underscored that science must be converted into evidence and information to help build early warning systems that translate into protection at the individual, community, and administrative levels in a country like India, adding that this is “not happening yet.”
“We saw huge interest at the Global Heat Forum from different players. Scientists, practitioners, policymakers, economists and doctors are coming together, and even sponsors and funders. This is the perfect forum to capture that expertise and put it together so that we can protect people,” he said.
Stressing on the long-term structural solutions to the heat crisis, Benjamin Hickman, Programme Manager at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in India, outlined the broader challenges that must be addressed alongside health risks.
“The critical message UNEP is bringing here is that while heat has a major impact on human health, we must think more broadly about its impact on food systems, energy grids, and the built environment,” Hickman told PTI.
“We cannot lose sight of mitigation and adaptation. For mitigation, we must focus on sustainable cooling. For adaptation, we need a multi-system approach, not just a healthcare one,” he added.
According to the UNEP official, the health system can provide immediate support during heatwaves, but crucially, health data can also be used to justify deeper systemic changes, such as integrating passive cooling into the homes of the most vulnerable populations.