With the UK now facing its third major heatwave of the year just weeks into summer, the sweltering temperatures of people’s homes and buckling publc transport, have laid bare just how badly adapted the country is to the climate crisis. “Believe me, when I was a child, it wasn't 35 degrees in London in June,” Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told attendees at an appropriately scorching recent edition of London Climate Action Week (LCAW).
But even in the UK, there are shops, cafés and offices with air conditioning, while many people can afford a fan or at least find somewhere to cool down. However, billions of people around the world have no such options, and extreme heat is no longer arriving in occasional “waves”, but increasingly becoming a daily lived reality. This year’s ”super” El Niño weather event is only expected to push millions more into crisis, bringing more droughts, floods and storms to climate-vulnerable parts of the world.
