How cultural spaces offer a cool escape from the heat

Everyone I speak to in the climate and weather prediction community tells me the same thing: the heatwaves of today are the coolest heatwaves we are likely to experience for the rest of our lives.

The UK has recently experienced one of its most severe heatwaves on record, coinciding with the London Climate Action Week. Daytime temperatures reach the high thirties – well above seasonal norms – and nighttime temperatures in the city didn’t drop below 23°C. This matters: it is not just the daytime high, but the diurnal variation – the difference between day and night temperature – that determines the kind of stress the human body experiences.

Eleven years after the adoption of the Sendai Framework, we can point to real achievements: fewer lives lost to disasters, more plans and strategies in place, better early warning coverage than ever before. But whatever progress has been made is vulnerable to one hazard above all others: extreme heat.

Undercounting extreme heat mortality

When I say we have made progress in reducing loss of lives, it comes with a qualifier: we are almost certainly undercounting deaths from extreme heat.

For many hazards – earthquakes, cyclones, fires – attribution of casualties is straightforward. With heat, the picture is far more complex. Hospitals rarely record heat as the primary cause of a death. Instead, a more proximate cause — a cardiac arrest, for instance — is recorded, even when the underlying chain of events was triggered by heat exposure.

When we model these fatalities using excess mortality analysis –comparing the number of deaths during a heatwave with a baseline of expected deaths – we find around half a million people die each year as a result of extreme heat.

Infrastructure is buckling under thermal stress

The systems that support our societies were designed for less extreme conditions.

Before traveling to London, I participated in a dialogue on extreme heat governance hosted by the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in Geneva, drawing in experts across a range of sectors.

We heard from the International Air Transport Association how aviation is affected – aircraft performance is reduced, loads need to be adjusted, and paved surfaces of airports designed for less extreme temperatures are destabilised. Plane tyres have even become stuck to melted tar on runways.

Energy production is compounding the problem –  we need more energy for cooling, while power plants themselves struggle to operate in the heat.

Across Europe last week, infrastructure of all kinds was malfunctioning at temperatures beyond its design range.

This is not an issue confined to the Global South. No country, region or sector is exempt, and it is only going to get worse. Amongst our priorities for building resilience, heat action has to be near the top – because extreme heat affects everyone and everything.

Cool off in Culture

The UK's record temperatures of the past week brought into sharp relief the need for accessible spaces where people can safely escape the heat. The Cool Off in Culture campaign – launched by the British Film Institute, LIVE (Live Music Industry Venues and Entertainment), and Arts Council England – transforms cultural venues into a national cooling network. Venues that offer air conditioning, free water refills, or shaded seating are valuable community resources during a heatwave.

These cultural spaces, as the campaign demonstrates, are powerful equalisers: they are open to everyone, regardless of income or circumstance.

The campaign is backed by a suite of free resources developed through two years of collaboration involving artists, designers, geomappers, researchers, policymakers, and funders. These include a marketing toolkit of free design assets, outdoor advertising triggered when temperatures pass 25°C, and a practical heat adaptation guide for arts and cultural organisations. The campaign is possible because of a collaborative partnership that draws together local government, national cultural institutions, and private companies.  

This initiative shows how climate adaptation can work in practice  – it is a model that has clear potential for replication in other countries and contexts.

We can take cool culture further together

The Cool off in Culture shows how arts and culture can play an important role in reducing risks with respect to extreme heat, but I believe we can take this model even further, and work with artists and cultural institutions to reduce risks associated with other hazards. Here are three ways this can be done:

First: Communicate risk in a more humane, more relatable way

We need to bring together the imagination of people working in culture and the arts to communicate risk better — in a more humane, more relatable way. A great deal of risk communication still sounds somewhat policy-driven and technical.

How do we give expression to the felt experience, the lived experience of people?

What activities of expression could help bring that to form — not only as an expression of distress, but as an expression of agency and of what we are going to do about it?

Even if all current emissions reduction efforts succeed in the next five to fifteen years, enough carbon is already in the atmosphere to sustain this warming trajectory. The signal will not reverse soon. We need ways of communicating that truth that resonate across all parts of society.

Second: Draw on ancient intelligence, not only artificial intelligence

There is enormous potential for cross-cultural exchange. There are cultures that have dealt with extreme heat not for decades but for centuries, or millennia. There are fascinating examples — in terms of dress, of vernacular architecture, of daily practice — of how communities have adapted to heat across generations.

It would be valuable to find ways of drawing on that tradition, that history, that wisdom. Everyone speaks about artificial intelligence. We should also speak about ancient intelligence, which may be equally relevant.

This matters too for the question of human agency. When young people express climate anxiety, I want to be able to say: look at how cultures across history have dealt with extreme events. It has been done before. What cross-cultural exchange is possible in the spaces you manage and govern?

Third: Share what is being done with the world

This experience should not remain a national secret. Once the UK’s heat season passes, it would be valuable to convene an exchange between several countries that have faced extreme heat this year — comparing what cultural spaces did, what worked, and what did not.

This same exercise could be replicated in any country, for any hazard. The questions are universal: What did cultural institutions do during the crisis? What worked, and what did not?

Approaching these questions with openness and genuine curiosity is itself a model worth sharing — for floods, hurricanes and storms, extreme cold, wherever communities are adapting cultural spaces to face climate risk.

The role of cultural intelligence in disaster risk reduction

The three areas I outline above – communicating risk in more human terms, drawing on the cultural intelligence that communities have accumulated across centuries, and sharing what works across borders – are not supplementary to the technical work of heat action. They are part of it.

Cultural institutions must play a central role in disaster risk reduction. They are some of our most trusted, most accessible spaces – both in physical and social terms. During a heatwave, they become infrastructure for resilience. During a period of deepening climate anxiety, they can become spaces where people encounter not only relief, but the evidence that human societies have faced extreme conditions before — and found ways to live with it.

That accumulated wisdom deserves the same attention we give to climate modelling and early warning systems. Ancient intelligence and artificial intelligence are not alternatives. Both have a place in building the resilience we need.

This article is based on my keynote address at the British Film Institute, at the relaunch of the Cool Off in Culture campaign, as part of London Climate Action Week.

The Cool Off in Culture partners and collaborators are Julie's Bicycle, Arts Council England, LIVE (Live music Industry Venues and Entertainment), London Councils, Bloomberg Associates, Shade the UK, British Film Institute (BFI), LIVE+BREATHE, Southbank & Waterloo Sustains Us.

Resources

• Cool Off in Culture resources, including a marketing toolkit, outdoor media and a heat adaptation guide for arts & cultural organisations
• UNDRR and Global Heat Health Information Network's Extreme Heat Risk Governance Framework and Toolkit
• More UNDRR resources on extreme heat resilience