Chief Heat Officer of Athens Eleni Myrivili visits Vancouver to speak at a global event*
April 2022, Aphrodite Bouikidis
This article was originally published in the May 2022 edition (p. 4) of the regional Hellenic newspaper Gnomi. The paper was published from 1988 to August 2022, when editor Kostas Karatsikis passed away. This is in his memory.
(*2023 update: Elissavet Bargianni is the current Chief Heat Office for the City of Athens.)
Throughout the cold and rainy months, many of us dream of vacations in sunny Greek summers. Extreme heat, however, can be deadly. In fact, it is the deadliest of all extreme weather phenomena. The 2003 European Heat Wave was one of the worst extreme heat disasters in history, as an estimated 70,000 people died from causes directly and indirectly related to a heat wave across 16 European countries.
While many European countries created alert and response plans for extreme heat after the 2003 heat wave disaster, governments and communities need to do more. The last decade was the hottest ever recorded on our planet. Extreme heat is becoming more frequent and lasting for longer periods with the impact of climate change. With this trend, deaths related to heat waves are expected to increase, because heat waves of long duration and high intensity have the highest impact on mortality.
The risk and impact of extreme heat is increasingly relevant in places that did not traditionally experience heat waves, including British Columbia, as we experienced last summer. In June, B.C. recorded the highest temperatures ever measured in the province and in all of Canada. The record temperature was 49.6 degrees Celsius in the town of Lytton. This was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history – nearly 600 people died, and roughly a quarter of these people lived in the Vancouver metropolitan area. The heat wave, or heat dome, also sparked extensive wildfires, including the fire that destroyed Lytton.
Athens is the first city in Europe and one of the first in the world to name a Chief Heat Officer to help the city prepare for extreme heat, protect the people most vulnerable to its impacts, and adopt climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Eleni Myrivili is the Chief Heat Officer and Advisor to the Mayor of Athens, after serving previously as a Deputy Mayor for Urban Nature and Climate Resilience. She also works with cities around the world as a senior advisor and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) based in the US.
She was in Vancouver April 10-14 to speak at the global event TED2022: A New Era. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but the annual conference also focuses on science, business, the arts and other global issues. It’s mission is to spread ideas, so the speakers deliver short talks and the videos are later posted on the TED.com website. The annual conference has been based in Vancouver since 2014.
Why do cities need a heat officer?
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous in cities. In the 2003 European Heat Wave, for example, the majority of deaths occurred in cities in France and Italy. Heat is increasingly affecting Athens, Vancouver and many cities around the world.
Extreme heat interacts with the human-built environment to create an urban climate. In a dynamic called the urban heat island effect, materials such as asphalt and concrete absorb heat and release it back into the air at night keeping temperatures high. Also, the way buildings are situated may restrict airflow, and cars, air conditioners and other activities produce anthropogenic heat and emissions. Air pollution in combination with extreme heat also contributes to increased deaths, and air pollution is often more present in urban areas.
Why Athens?
Athens is one of the most heat stressed capitals of Europe. In a survey of more than 2,000 residents as part of the municipality’s recent update of its 2017 climate action plan, nearly 70% of respondents indicated that heat waves are the climate change impact that they are worried about the most. A 10-day heat wave in 1987 resulted in more than 1,000 deaths, with some estimates suggesting more than 2,000 deaths were linked with the heat wave. Just last year in August, Greece experienced the worst heat wave in decades, with temperatures reaching a record-breaking 46.3 degrees Celsius. An estimated 2,300 deaths were linked to this heat wave, and wildfires burned through more than 200,000 acres of forest in the regions of Attica, Euboea, Elis, Messenia, and Laconia.
The city is now taking bold action as climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat and drought in the region.
The Work of a Heat Advisor
As a heat advisor for cities, Myrivili’s work focuses on three key areas of action: 1) raising awareness about the dangers of extreme heat in cities by categorizing heat waves according to health risk, 2) immediate preparedness actions for people and the city, and 3) redesigning the human-built environment to bring nature back into urban areas and everyday life.
Categorizing Heat Waves by Health Risk
To raise awareness about the health risks of heat waves and guide action to reduce health risks and impacts, Myrivili is leading the Arsht-Rock initiative to categorize heat waves like we categorize hurricanes. Categorizing heat waves based on potential health risk will help people understand how to prepare and protect themselves and their neighbors, and will allow local officials, emergency managers and health officials to implement measures to reduce risk and respond to heat emergencies. “It allows for better communication, including in the media, and it allows for people to trigger warnings and other measures that are important. I think it will be a game changer,” says Myrivili.
The cities of Athens and Seville, Spain are piloting the initiative to categorize heat waves based on location-specific conditions and considerations. To do this, Athens collected data for the last three decades about the kinds of air masses that sit above the region and created typologies based on the temperature, humidity, wind, atmospheric pressure and other characteristics. It then created an algorithm to forecast health vulnerability and risk according to categories of heat waves. These cities will begin categorizing heat waves and communicating these categories and the appropriate response actions this summer.
Preparedness through immediate actions
To help people get through heat waves and protect those who are most vulnerable to the health impacts of extreme heat, the City of Athens, in collaboration with the National Observatory of Athens (a public research centre), the Medical School of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and ARATOS-Systems, launched the EXTREMA project (https://extrema-global.com). They created the Extrema smartphone application that uses real-time satellite data and city-specific data to evaluate the real-time health risk of the user at their location, and offers alerts and directions to nearby cooling centres or cooler walking routes. Municipality staff add cooling centre locations to the app, including air conditioned spaces like the municipality Friendship Centres for seniors (Λέσχες Φιλίας) and indoor swimming facilities, as well as parks and green spaces identified by residents as ‘cool’ green spaces through a recent survey.
The Athens municipality also runs the “Help at Home Plus” program, where social workers, medical staff, and municipality employees visit people that are isolated at home to offer medical care, counseling or delivery of groceries and medicines. This program supported people during the pandemic and it is important during heat waves. It currently serves close to 400 people, but the municipality is looking at ways to expand the service to reach thousands of residents by working with networks of neighbourhood volunteers.
Redesigning and cooling cities with nature
As extreme heat becomes more frequent, cities grow, and climate change continues to accelerate, Myrivili argues that the most transformational and urgently needed action is to redesign our cities, going beyond air conditioning, energy efficiency and even cutting carbon emissions. We need to bring nature back into cities – throughout public spaces and our human-built environment and infrastructures. We need to change our entire approach to building and maintaining urban areas so that they are not creating or amplifying heat and making people more vulnerable to health risks.
This requires a long-term commitment and a holistic approach to change the way we design and live in our urban environments. Athens is a densely built city. In earlier decades, authorities and developers built the urban area in ways that depleted the forests around the city (peri-urban), covered the natural water network of the Attica plain, including its two main rivers, left very little green space, and made the metropolis dependent on cars and roads. Today, more than 80% of the city ground is covered by buildings, roads, pavement and infrastructure that is non-water permeable. This results in flash flooding and contributes to the urban heat island effect making the city hotter.
Athens is already beginning to address this problem by reviving a long-unused ancient architectural marvel. The Roman-era Hadrian’s Aqueduct, first set in operation in 140 A.D., still moves more than a million tons of water from Mt. Parnitha each year across 20 kilometers underneath the city. Until now, water continued flowing through the aqueduct but it was allowed to simply flow out into the sea. Today, the City of Athens and several other municipalities in the metro area are working on plans to use this water for irrigation, for increasing the trees and green spaces throughout the city, and for bringing more water features to the surface throughout neighbourhoods.
“Heat destroys quietly, yet there is no escape from heat,” Myrivili said during her TED talk. Avoiding repeated heat wave deaths and disasters requires urgent action to transform our cities. As Myrivili says, “Cranking up the air conditioning is just not going to cut it.”
The video of Eleni Myrivili’s presentation at TED 2022 is available here.