Rising heat is a crisis for the world. For the unhoused, it can be a death sentence. That has become abundantly clear in Phoenix, where heat mortalities have increased 1,000 percent over the past decade as climate change turbocharges summer temperatures. Punishing heat led to a record 645 deaths last year in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest metropolitan area, and almost half the victims were homeless. Officials are trying to reduce this year's death count — no small feat amid a dearth of funding for heat waves, writes Ariel Wittenberg. Phoenix will rely on temporary pandemic relief funding to establish more cooling centers that remain open overnight. But the plan is a stopgap solution for a long-term crisis threatening cities across the country as a changing climate continues to bake the planet. Global heat waves are happening more frequently and moving 20 percent more slowly than they were 45 years ago, according to a recent study in Science Advances. That means people are staying hotter longer. This year is already on track to be among the hottest in history. In India, record-breaking temperatures are hindering turnout for the country’s general elections. And the increasing odds of a heat wave during this summer’s Olympics in Paris are beginning to worry athletes — whose lodging at the games won’t have air conditioning. In Phoenix, America’s hottest city, the crisis is compounded by soaring eviction rates. The number of unhoused people in Maricopa County has doubled since 2017. Around the time the U.S. Supreme Court ended a pandemic-era eviction moratorium, heat deaths in the county began to surge. Heat is now the second-biggest killer of homeless people there, behind drug overdoses. Phoenix, like a growing number of cities, has employed a “chief heat officer” to help prepare and adapt to increasingly brutal summers — but with scarce resources, the task is challenging. (Some states, meanwhile, have prohibited local governments from mandating heat protections, such as water breaks for workers). David Hondula, Phoenix’s director of heat response and mitigation, told Ariel the lack of federal funding is ludicrous. “Every winter in New England, are the churches trying to raise money to buy the snow plow? And then that’s the only snow plow the community has? I’m guessing not,” he said.
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