The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Extreme heat poses a significant and often underrepresented threat to communities around the world, especially in regions like Jacobabad, Pakistan, where temperatures can exceed 126 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity. Despite contributing minimally to global CO₂ emissions, these areas suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change and lack widespread access to mitigating resources such as air conditioning. Communicating the severity of extreme heat is challenging because it is an invisible hazard with few visual cues, making it difficult for media and photojournalists to effectively convey its impact on human life.

Efforts to depict the human struggle against extreme heat focus on illustrating how it affects daily activities: people employing makeshift methods for cooling, workers exhausted from laboring in high temperatures, and communities adapting to survive under relentless conditions. However, public awareness is hindered by inconsistent definitions and measurements of heat waves, such as varying temperature indexes and a lack of standardized warning systems. Unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, heat waves lack clear metrics and visual representations, leading to confusion and inadequate responses to heat-related threats.

Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, prioritized making extreme heat a visible and urgent concern. She proposed a system to name and rank heat waves, aiming to enhance public awareness and encourage preventive actions.