On a 90-degree afternoon last summer, officers from the Providence Police Department attended a construction site on Sabin Street. A worker on a 40-foot scaffold had collapsed in the heat. Firefighters carried him down to street level, and co-workers poured cold water on his face. He was given CPR at the scene. The man was taken to Rhode Island Hospital—where he died an hour after having collapsed.
Every summer, a wave of similar tragedies sweeps the country, with deaths from severe temperatures telling an increasingly familiar story. According to the World Health Organization, heat stress—not hurricanes, flooding or fire—is the leading cause of weather-related death. And the number of those deaths is climbing. Last year, 2,302 people died from heat-related causes according to federal figures—a number experts say is probably an underestimate due to incomplete data. But the alarms have been sounding for decades. Between 2000-2004 and 2017-2021, heat-related mortality increased globally by 85 percent for people over age 65.
In the early 2000s, an undergraduate at Brown, Allan Just ’05, stumbled upon worrying descriptions of how climate change would upend the world in the decades ahead. A student of environmental science and epidemiology, Just read early reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in which scientists sounded the alarm about rising sea levels, increased droughts and more powerful extreme weather events—all in the coming decades.
“Now those decades have passed,” says Just, who returned to Brown in 2023 as an associate professor of epidemiology and environment and society. “And here we are.”
While he was conducting research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Just began thinking more about the brutal summers he was experiencing each year in New York City. He had been working on air pollution, making high-resolution maps of where, exactly, particulate matter travels and lingers, and now, he decided to study the public health effects of extreme heat. But he quickly hit a difficulty. When it comes to severe temperatures, Just found that nobody really knows how hot it gets where people live.
Read the full story from the Brown University School of Public Health