Women Heat Officers Are Trying to Protect the World From Extreme Temps

On Tuesday, officials in Florida’s Miami-Dade County rejected a bill that would have created the first county-level workplace heat protections in the United States. In the face of our ever-increasing climate challenges, such regulations can save lives. But there are few laws in place around the world that protect people who work outdoors, let alone dedicated offices to protection from heat.

Still, Miami has one of seven women “chief heat officers” around the world. From Florida to Santiago de Chile, these women are working to implement long-term plans to handle extreme heat as well as to improve community responses to rising temperatures.

Two of these heat officers work in the developing world — in Bangladesh and Sierra Leone — where women often suffer the most from the ever-increasing heat. Women tend to work in open-air markets selling vegetables, charcoal, and other goods, and they make up the majority of farmers — in Africa, women compose between 60 and 80 percent.

Eugenia Kargbo, 26, was appointed the chief heat officer of Freetown in Sierra Leone in 2021. She is the first person on the continent to occupy the position, BBC reports.

“We’ve experienced over the past years a change in climate, and we’ve seen floods, we’ve witnessed mudslides, and we’ve witnessed sea level rise,” Kargbo said. “And now, more than ever, extreme heat and rising temperatures. And this is really posing a threat to human security, to food security, and to the environment.”

In 2017, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranked Sierra Leone the third-most vulnerable country to climate change after Bangladesh and Guinea Bissau. The average daytime temperature in Freetown — which suffers from the urban heat island effect, with an average of over 80 percent humidity — is 83 degrees, according to a group called Meer, which stands for “mirrors for Earth’s energy rebalancing.” The organization is working to “provide practical and scalable heat adaptation and mitigation solutions.”

Some of the mitigation measures Kargbo has already taken include installing shade covers made of heat-reflective plexiglass for 2,300 street vendors in three of Freetown’s largest open-air market. She has also overseen the installation of mirror coverings on buildings to help keep heat out. Nearly 100 percent of Freetown’s buildings have low surface reflectivity, meaning heat is absorbed and left to warm the city like a furnace. The markets’ shade covers also have solar panels, which allow women to work longer hours. The shades, which resemble a kind of see-through awning, are replacing beach umbrellas that each vendor used to have to buy at their own expense.

Freetown’s slums are made up of tin houses, which heat like ovens under the West African sun. Meer approached Kargbo about installing reflective materials on rooftops to mitigate it. Her response: “Why not?”

Right now, they are focusing on coating the roofs of 55 houses.

Buildings topped with new zinc roofs are cooling inside temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, and buildings painted white cool by about 3 degrees Celsius, Meer says. But buildings covered in the group’s unique film coating and mirrors register at 25 degrees Celsius lower than before, they report. That’s 77 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.

The results, Kargbo says, “are showing an amazing success.” She’s waiting to see what happens in the dry season, however.

“Depending on its success and the availability of funding, we hope to roll the project out in other heat-trapped buildings across the city,” she said.