By Lauren Anderson and Sheela Patel

On this Heat Action Day, observed on 2 June, the climate-driven threat of extreme heat has jumped from the pages of assessment reports to the lived experience of millions. At the end of May, New Delhi recorded a record setting high temperature of 49°C, with northern Indian states reporting dozens of heat-related deaths. The monkeys and birds were even succumbing to heatstroke, falling out of trees. Conditions were not that much different in neighboring Pakistan, which also battled wildfires. A few weeks back, heat shut down the schools in South Sudan and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Global warming is here, and it is time to think seriously about transformative adaptation. These are the “path-shifting, innovative, multi-scale, systemwide, and persistent” adaptations that will enable societal resilience to the most existential of climate-driven threats. Not only is the heat extreme, but it is also predicted to get worse, and its impacts will be compounded by megatrends in migration, urbanization, and inequality. The transformative adaptation needed to prepare for this reality is, to borrow the movie title, going to take everyone, everywhere, all at once. Universities, with their vast research agendas and convening power can and should play a bigger role.

By 2050, about 2.5 billion more people may move to urban areas, where the built environment traps and amplifies temperatures. Most of these urbanites will find themselves in Asian and African cities, already experiencing temperatures touching the limits of livability. The majority of these newcomers are also likely to make their homes in informal settlements, communities characterized by inadequate service provision and energy poverty. This means that, in a few decades, there will be millions of people moving to cities without the resources they need to stay safe from ever rising temperatures.

We need a whole-of-society effort to address this confluence of challenges, answering questions like: how can we ready urban areas to receive millions of people in the hottest of conditions? Most of the infrastructure needed hasn’t yet been built, so there is an opportunity to get it right. What is needed to prevent heatwaves from becoming mass casualty events?  Research shows that in Phoenix, Arizona, a heatwave, coupled with a blackout, would send millions to the hospital, crippling medical services. This doesn’t have to happen in the US or elsewhere if we prepare now for what we know is coming.

Tackling these questions will require input from many disciplines – engineering, design, law, medicine, and so forth. Fortunately, places of higher learning house a variety of research centers and can bring them together with other stakeholders. Echoed by the USAID Heat Action Hub, universities are well positioned to contribute – not only by unlocking technological innovations (like heat mapping, cool roofs, and the like) but also by feeding the large-scale and creative thinking needed to tackle a threat as intergenerational, cross-sectoral, and complicated as extreme heat.

This is the thrust of our work on adaptation at Perry World House, where we routinely see the benefit of marrying different academic disciplines to a challenge, of bringing research to decision makers, and of giving policymakers the space to think, pivot, and plan. We’ll need more of this if we are going to write a playbook for transformational adaptation that helps us survive existential climate threats. Extreme heat will be one of many.

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Lauren Anderson is Director of Programs at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania.

Sheela Patel is Director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers.