The lavvu is set up in the traditional way: three, debarked birch rods holding up a cloth exterior. The lavvu, a traditional Sámi structure that resembles a teepee or a tent, is insulated with reindeer skins, and in the center, on a floor of twigs, a hearth. Typically a fire would be burning, but for now, a plant stands.

Traditionally, one doesn’t stand inside a lavvu save to enter and sit, so Mihkkal Hætta, the 22-year-old Sámi organizer from the village of Kautokeino, Norway, gestured to me to sit on the soft reindeer pelts.

“Welcome,” said Hætta. “I’ve been staying here for three weeks now.”

With the door closed, fresh air circled through the dwelling from an opening at the top of the lavvu. It was remarkably quiet inside, and soothing. 

Outside stood the Norwegian Parliament. Street musicians busked for tourists, scooters and cars flew by, and dog walkers filed past Hætta’s temporary home. A cluster of Sami youth and other environmental activists also gathered. Curious passersby stopped to ask what was going on. Most asked what a lavvu was doing on official government property.

“I came here on September the 11th because it’s been 700 days since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of [the Sámis from Fosen],” Hætta would explain. “It’s quite unbelievable that a state like Norway lets human rights violations continue for 700 days. And it’s still ongoing.” 

Hætta said most people from Oslo who come to the lavvu say they support him, but in the early days of his protest, there were several incidents: a rock band tried to break in one night and another time, someone stole some of his clothing.

Hætta’s presence in Oslo is becoming a familiar one — as are his comrades, and their attempts to bring attention to the Fosen case. On October 11, 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the Fosen wind farm near the city of Trondheim, on the nation’s central-west coast, violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders, the cultural rights of the Sámi people, and were constructed illegally. 

Now, on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the court’s ruling, Hætta’s one-month protest serves as a reminder that despite Norway’s international renown for human rights advocacy and standards, Indigenous peoples inside the country’s borders still have no recourse to justice. 

“I became really angry, losing more and more hope and losing more and more faith with the government,” said Hætta. “So I decided to put up a lavvu here outside the Norwegian Parliament to remind them that this is still ongoing.”

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While Hætta’s protest has gone on for a full month, he’s not alone, and it’s not his first. By night, allies and friends look out for him, taking turns on night watch shifts outside the lavvu to keep him safe. And with the exact anniversary of the court ruling only one day away, more and more supporters are arriving to support, with buses coming from Sámi villages and communities across Sápmi — the traditional territory of the Sámi stretching from Russia across northern Finland into Sweden and Norway. 

“I’m never alone here,” he said. “I couldn’t do this if I was alone. I have a lot of people around me.” 

Hætta first became involved with the Fosen case earlier this year. On February 23, exactly 500 days after the court’s ruling, the Norwegian Sámi Association’s Youth Committee, also known as NSR-N, began occupying the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy in protest of the Norwegian government’s inaction after the verdict. Hætta took part. 

During the protest, nearly 30 demonstrators, including Hætta, were arrested and another 90 removed from the Ministry’s property by police. Over the course of a week, Sámi youth organizers were joined by land and rights defenders from Young Friends of the Earth Norway, Greenpeace, Greta Thunberg, and nearly 2,000 additional supporters. Human rights campaigners eventually shut down 10 ministries and ended their protest outside Norway’s royal palace.

In the wake of the actions, the Minister of Petroleum and Energy delivered an official apology to reindeer herders in Fosen and acknowledged that the wind park constituted a human rights violation, while the Sámi Parliament of Norway demanded the windmills be demolished and the area restored to reindeer grazing land. Instead, however, Norwegian officials have attempted to negotiate with reindeer herders in order to keep the Fosen wind park operational.

Much of the energy produced at the $1.3 billion Fosen wind park will be part of Norway’s green transition — approximately 98 percent of the country’s electricity comes from renewable sources. However, in 2021, almost 17 percent of that electricity was exported to other European countries. There are nearly 53 wind farms operating, or under construction, in Norway right now, and it’s estimated that another 100 licenses have been granted by the government with many slated for construction in Sápmi. 

“By failing to enforce a judgment by its highest Court, the Norwegian government is denying the rights of Indigenous Sámi to their cultural heritage and livelihoods,” said Carla Garcia Zendejas, Director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s People, Land and Resources Program in Geneva, Switzerland. “Sámi leaders should not need to put themselves at risk to ensure that effective justice is carried out. Not only does this cast a shadow on the Norwegian government’s commitment to upholding human rights obligations, it questions the rule of law.”

In June of this year, Hætta marked 600 days of inaction by joining with NSR-N and Motvind Norge, an organization that opposes the construction of wind turbines on conservation grounds, to demonstrate outside the Norwegian Parliament again, while activists blockaded the entrance to the wind park at Fosen.

Recently, 24-year-old cultural worker Emily Cottingham from Tønsberg and 26-year-old Daniel Fuller were guarding the lavvu. Fuller, who is Irish-British, works at a nearby cafe and became involved when he began offering coffee to Hætta and other activists outside the Parliament. 

“I have always been interested in decolonization, having studied this,” said Fuller. “When I saw that Mihkkal moved into the lavvu, I realized that it was time to put my theory into practice.”

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Then there’s Israel Nebeker, an American musician from Oregon who has come to Norway to trace his Sámi roots. When Nebeker heard about the Fosen case, and the actions taking place, he extended his trip.

“It feels important to be at this demonstration, to show my support for the Sámi at Fosen, and to hold the government accountable to its own laws,” said Nebeker. “It’s time for the government of Norway to protect the rights of Sámi, instead of continuing a history of brutal injustice.”

In 1981, Sámi organizers began demonstrations in Oslo to protest a proposed hydroelectric dam in Sápmi. Known as the Alta Action, Indigenous leaders occupied a government building and began hunger strikes. While efforts were unsuccessful in stopping the dam from being built, the moment marked a major turning point in Indigenous resistance in the region.

“When my father lived in Oslo as a young man, he attended the Alta demonstrations,” said Nebeker. “The Sámi have been fighting for far, far too long.”

Demonstrations are expected to begin tomorrow as more human rights campaigners make their way to Oslo. Sámi people that have worn Gaktis, traditional clothing, are wearing them inside out — an old Sámi tradition that communicates protest. When Sámi people turn their Gaktis inside out, it signifies resistance.

“It’s completely despicable for a country like Norway to ignore its own courts and laws,” said Hætta. “It’s a human rights violation, and it’s been going on for 729 days.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Indigenous youth are gathering in Oslo to fight a green energy project on Oct 10, 2023.

This story is the first in a four-part Grist series examining how climate change is destabilizing the global insurance market. It is published in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

“We’ve got ourselves a little monster out there,” anchorman Jim Cantore warned, facing the camera in the Weather Channel’s newsroom on a sultry August weekend in 1992. At first, few in Florida were paying attention. “It’s very hard to get people to believe that there’s some danger from some element of nature that they haven’t experienced before,” a reporter told Cantore, as the channel played tape of tranquil beaches and neat vacation homes. 

As the storm approached Florida, it gained the moniker Andrew, rapidly intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane as it exceeded wind speeds of 165 mph. Karen Clark watched updates on TV from her home in Boston with fascinated horror — and her career on the line. 

Most insurance companies at that time assessed hurricane exposure in their portfolios by simply multiplying customer premiums by a rough factor of supposed risk, rather than tracking actual property replacement costs. “They were just very crude formulas,” she said. 

So in 1987, Clark had started her own company, Applied Insurance Research, or AIR, to develop software that better estimated the potential losses from catastrophic events. Unlike the rest of the industry, she used granular data and sophisticated analyses, an approach now called catastrophe modeling. Her first computer model estimated that a Category 5 hurricane hitting Dade County could cause losses almost 10 times more than previously believed. She warned her customers about the risk in Florida, but until Hurricane Andrew, no one listened. “The good ol’ boys at Lloyds [of London], you know, they thought they had it all figured out,” she said. “They didn’t need any help from this American woman carrying around a little computer.”

By that Sunday morning in 1992, it became clear that Andrew’s eye was aiming straight for Miami. Clark rushed into the AIR office, where her models suggested that the storm could cause at least $13 billion in damages — a disaster so expensive at first she debated whether she should publish the results. 

As the hurricane made landfall the next day, it tore palm trees from the ground and stripped roofs from houses, carving a devastating path across southern Florida. Over 100,000 homes were damaged, and an additional 50,000 were destroyed. When a client called asking about his probable losses, Clark told him around $200 million dollars. “He said, ‘For the industry?’ and I was like, ‘No. For your company.’” AIR’s estimates turned out to be conservative: Andrew eventually cost the insurance industry $15 billion. 

In the aftermath, Clark said, “everyone knew the market was going to radically change.” The catastrophe models she developed quickly became the industry standard, changing how American companies navigated risk from natural disasters. 

In hindsight, it was the beginning of the dynamic now driving insurance markets. To handle massive payout events like Andrew, insurance companies sell policies across different markets — historically, a hurricane wasn’t hitting Florida in the same month a wildfire wiped out a town in California. They themselves also pay for insurance, a financial instrument called reinsurance that helps distribute risk across geographic regions. Reinsurance availability remains a major driver of what insurance you can buy — and how much it costs.

But as climate change intensifies extreme weather and claims pile up, this system has been thrown into disarray. Insured losses from natural disasters in the U.S. now routinely approach $100 billion a year, compared to $4.6 billion in 2000. As a result, the average homeowner has seen their premiums spike 21 percent since 2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the states most likely to have disasters — like Texas and Florida — have some of the most expensive insurance rates. That means ever more people are forgoing coverage, leaving them vulnerable and driving prices even higher as the number of people paying premiums and sharing risk shrinks. 

This vicious cycle also increases reinsurers’ rates. Reinsurers globally raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023, contributing to insurance companies pulling back from risky states like California and Florida. “As events are getting bigger and more costly, that has raised the prices of reinsurance in those areas,” said Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, who studies insurance. “It’s called the hardening of the market.” 

In a worse-case scenario, this all leads to a massive stranded asset problem: Premiums get so high that property values plummet, families’ investments dissipate, and banks are stuck holding what’s left.   

More simply, the global process for handling life’s risks is breaking down, leaving those who can least afford it unprotected.

The idea of distributing risk has been around since the 14th century, when insurers of trading ships wanted someone to share the uncertainties of long sea voyages. Modern reinsurance was established in 19th century Europe, which some historians credit to large fires in Hamburg, Germany, and Glarus, Switzerland, where significant losses led to the founding of many of today’s leading reinsurance companies.

These companies were also some of the first to issue warnings about climate change. Back in 1973, Munich Re, one of the world’s major reinsurance firms, noticed a spike in the number of flood damage claims. In a prescient report, the company noted “the rising temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere,” due to the “rise of the CO2 content of the air, causing a change in the absorption of solar energy.”

Now, the world is reaping the consequences of that change. In the last decade, the frequency of global natural catastrophes jumped by 28 percent. On a single day in July, 60 percent of the U.S. population faced an extreme weather alert. Costs have catapulted too: Since 1970, losses from disasters increased an average 5 percent a year, particularly in the United States. That’s because damage also depends on vulnerability and exposure — where people live, and how prepared they are. Tragically, the fastest-growing counties also face some of the highest risks. “It doesn’t have to be one of these huge events,” said Alice Hill, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies climate consequences. “It’s [also] successive events, back-to-back,” like the 12 atmospheric rivers that hit California this winter.

Reinsurers are particularly exposed to these hazards because many insurance companies seek primarily to cover catastrophic risks — major events like hurricanes that are intensifying as the world warms. In a letter to shareholders this summer, Christian Mumenthaler, the group CEO of global reinsurance company Swiss Re, wrote, “Climate change continues to take its toll … across multiple geographies.” 

As a result, the reinsurance industry has paid dearly for much of the last decade; underwriting losses drove $115 billion in global reinsurance losses in 2022. “There’s a tension over a business model that’s retrospective, with a risk that’s emerging,” said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. The financial foundation of insurance, in other words, is cracking. 

“Without global reinsurance, we wouldn’t have the capacity to provide sufficient disaster coverage for everyone,” Kousky said. “It’s essential.” But unlike insurers, who face political pressures from state regulators to keep rates affordable, reinsurance is much more of a free market. A recent report from Moody’s finds that reinsurers are reacting by raising their rates, limiting their coverage, and even deciding to reduce their exposure in places like Florida. Increasingly, the reinsurance industry is reassessing what are known as “secondary perils,” or things like flooding and wildfires — hazards that were previously less costly than major events like hurricanes, but which are becoming more common. 

Because getting risk wrong is now so costly, there’s been a race in the private sector to model future odds. Jenny Dissen works at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, a research institute that’s part of NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies. She says she frequently fields calls from insurers eager to know the latest climate indicators. Yet critics worry this rush to fine-tune risk predictions may potentially accelerate skyrocketing premiums. Since many are proprietary, the accuracy of these assessments can be difficult to vet. They are also having unintended consequences, like lowering municipal bond ratings, hindering governments’ ability to respond to extreme weather by raising funds. 

Some believe that an individual focus is likely not the best — or most equitable — way to address climate adaptation. “Many of these adaptation steps are like a kind of public good,” that can’t be taken on an individual level, like building a seawall, said Madison Condon, Boston University law professor and corporate and environmental law professor. “They work best if everyone takes them.”

The economic implications of all this are troubling. A new report by the U.S. Treasury Department, released at the end of June, found major gaps in the supervision and regulation of insurers. The report advised much closer attention to “the risks the insurance industry may pose to the overall financial sector.” 

While insurance prices have soared, a recent report from the nonprofit First Street Foundation estimates that 39 million homes are covered at prices artificially lower than their true risk. The authors suggest that state regulations capping premiums and government-backed insurer-of-last-resort programs have concealed the extent of the crisis. They predict that as disasters continue surging, what they call the “growing climate bubble in the housing market” will pop — leaving millions of homes uninsurable and destroying their value. The average homeowner who loses an insurance policy automatically sees a drop of more than 10 percent in the home’s value, the report notes. “If the value of their home plummets or if the credit agencies downgrade their communities,” Hill said, “one of my big fears is we’re going to have a lot of people trapped in places that are unsafe, economically trapped.” 

Such concerns prompted the Treasury Department last year to require 213 large insurers — companies like Allstate and Farmers Insurance — to provide data about their homeowner policies. Its initial goal was to collect information about coverage, claims, and premiums by zip code to identify where climate change may disrupt markets. The plan faced fierce opposition from the industry, which says it’s a regulatory burden and that disclosing this data may harm companies’ competitive advantage. Results are not anticipated in 2023, and will not include other common types of insurance impacted by climate, like flood insurance — which is often covered in a separate policy from homeowners insurance. 

This spring, one of the largest insurance brokerage companies warned Congress they weren’t moving fast enough. “Just as the U.S. economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is over-exposed to climate risk,” Aon PLC president Eric Anderson told Senate budget committee members. Yet there appears to be little federal urgency in addressing the problem. 

Experts warn that increasing prices may tip homeowners toward default as more insurers flee. At least five major companies have stopped writing coverage in some regions. State Farm announced this spring that it would stop selling homeowners’ policies in California. The company cited “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.” Allstate also quietly stopped writing new policies in the Golden State in June. In Louisiana, where at least 20 companies have left in the last two years, the situation has gotten so bad the state passed a $45 million funding bill in 2023 in an effort to woo insurers back. 

Though government has been slow to address these trends, global financial markets are already basing investment decisions on climate risks. Major ratings companies like Moody’s and McKinsey have recently purchased climate data firms. First Street Foundation, for example, provides climate risk information to many banks, major reinsurers, and government agencies — including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are already using it to screen for mortgages’ climate exposures. Mortgage-purchasers like these, after all, are the ones who may soon be left holding the ashes of assets.

Meanwhile homeowners, many of whose mortgages require insurance, are left with limited options. After six property insurance companies in Florida declared bankruptcy in 2022, for instance, many property owners had to turn to state-run insurers, like Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp., a government-backed entity serving otherwise uninsurable populations. Although its policies tend to be less comprehensive than private insurance, in the last year, its ranks swelled about 50 percent, to around 1.7 million people. Yet this year, as Florida’s reinsurance rates skyrocketed 30 to 50 percent, even these last-resort policy rates spiked 12 percent, leaving many families to weigh whether they can afford to keep their insurance. 

If the state is hit by a major hurricane, the program has grown so large the resulting claims could outstrip Citizens’ budget. The program can’t go out of business like a private company, but if it runs out of money, Florida law allows Citizens to issue one-time bills charging customers up to 45 percent of their annual premium. Someone who just lost their home in a hurricane, in other words, could be facing a surprise bill of thousands of dollars.

Not only is that bad for the families whose losses aren’t protected, it deepens existing inequities. Right now, the insurance market is unintentionally protecting wealthy property owners while socializing their risk through highly subsidized premiums. The federal government holds the liability for the majority of flood insurance, for example, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Repeatedly flooded properties make up just 1 percent of the program’s policies but account for more than 30 percent of the claims. “When the government’s the backup insurer, the taxpayers have to support that,” Hill said.

Two out of every three American homes are now underinsured, meaning owners may face major financial losses if they were to endure a disaster. The effects won’t be felt equally. There can be an inherent tension between climate-related financial risks and anti-redlining efforts: People of color who have long suffered discrimination are now disproportionately living in areas at greater danger of disaster. That makes it difficult to both price climate risks and not divest from underserved communities.

Despite being one of the first to understand these perils, insurers continue to contribute to them. They’ve played a major role in emissions for decades: Without insurance, fossil fuel companies have difficulty obtaining financing. Coal is an apt example of what happens when insurers withdraw from a market — since 45 insurers are phasing out of coal policies, construction of new coal-fired power declined by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. 

But insurers have been slower to move away from oil and gas, in part because it’s a larger part of many companies’ business. In June, the Senate Budget Committee sent letters to major insurance companies asking for information about how much each company earns from the fossil fuel industry. “[I]t is difficult to understand how the industry can carefully price and manage climate risk in some areas of its business,” committee members wrote, “while simultaneously having no apparent plan to phase out its underwriting of and investment in the projects and companies generating the emissions that are causing these very harms.”

Prompted in part by concerns over this kind of liability, the reinsurance industry has begun warning about the need to reduce climate risk. “The economic and insured losses over time are a clear indicator that the past is not a representation of the future,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights at Munich Re US. Physical mitigation, like building flood walls and buffer zones will be needed, he says, but funding and building these engineering measures can be difficult.

With insurers themselves running out of insurance options, the stability of financial systems is far shakier than many realize. Yet the federal government hasn’t developed a national adaptation plan that comprehensively addresses these concerns. In its absence, decisions are left to municipal and state governments, some of which are facing serious blowback. When Hawai‘i recently attempted to increase setbacks for future oceanfront construction, for example, citing immediate sea-level rise, homeowners managed to stall the plan. Experts like Condon call for a centralized national climate service that can help guide these adaptations and regulatory policies, based on transparent and specific risk assessments.

“If you want to know the truth, the science is the easy part,” Karen Clark said. Getting people to change their behavior, on the other hand, is difficult. She is still working on catastrophic modeling, now at her eponymous firm, where she urges decisionmakers to get more realistic, and quickly. “People don’t understand a basic economic law — there’s no free lunch. There’s a risk,” she said. “Somebody’s paying for it. It’s just a question of who.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate risks mount, the insurance safety net is collapsing on Oct 10, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

This summer was the hottest ever recorded, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year in history. Next year is likely to be even warmer thanks to a strengthening El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern that contributes to above-average temperatures across much of the globe. The extreme heat has made the consequences of more than a century of reckless reliance on fossil fuels impossible to ignore. 

As it gets hotter, more people will succumb to heat-related illnesses. The average number of heat-associated deaths that occur every year in the U.S. rose 95 percent between 2010 and 2022. That data doesn’t include this year’s record-breaking summer. The good news is that heat-related illness is highly treatable. The key is to get the right resources to the right places in time to save lives. 

A first-of-its-kind initiative called the Climate Health Equity for Community Clinics Program aims to fight back against the rising tide of heat-associated illnesses in the U.S. by getting resources and training into the hands of doctors and the communities they treat. The program, announced last month by the global health and development nonprofit Americares and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is the result of a year of research on the climate-related health threats that clinicians across the nation face on a daily basis. Heat, the primary cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. in 2022, quickly floated to the top of the list of clinicians’ concerns, followed by wildfire smoke. Americares and Harvard, with $2 million in funding from Johnson & Johnson, the multinational pharmaceutical company, partnered with 10 clinics in Florida, Louisiana, and Arizona. The program aims to expand to 100 clinics by 2025. 

The idea behind the program is to ensure that medical professionals at free clinics and community health centers, which work closely with disadvantaged, uninsured communities, identify which of their patients are most vulnerable to extreme heat and arm them with the tools they need to avoid ending up in the hospital with heat-related illness or heatstroke. Providers at participating clinics will be able to type patient information, symptoms, and relevant environmental factors into an online tool and receive a tailored heat mitigation plan from Americares and Harvard. Clinics in the program will also be alerted when dangerous heat waves are bearing down on their area. 

“It’s all about preparedness and how we can help save lives when these heat disasters happen,” said Suzanne Roberts, chief executive officer at the Virginia B. Andes Volunteer Community Clinic in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her clinic, which has served its community since 2008, is one of the first 10 pilot clinics being funded by the new program. “We see our patients coming in with heatstroke, we see our patients coming in with nausea, and they don’t understand that it is related to the heat. We hope to learn the rules of the road so when this happens — and it will continue to happen — we will be prepared.” 

Excessive heat erodes human health in a staggeringly wide array of ways. Heat affects our motor functions, appetite, quality of sleep, and our drug and alcohol intake. It puts stress on our bodies and exacerbates underlying conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It damages our mental health and affects the medications people take to keep depression at bay. It worsens schizophrenia. It can cause third-degree burns from contact with pavement and hot surfaces. And when people are exposed to high temperatures for too long, heat causes their core temperature to rise. Many people, especially those without access to air conditioning, experience excessive sweating, goosebumps, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, shaking, fainting, and other symptoms of severe heat-related illness. The unluckiest — including more than 1,500 Americans last year — die. 

Global health outfits like the World Health Organization and governments have long engaged in heat health action planning to prepare for the health impacts of elevated heat at the national level. Municipalities in the U.S. use this type of planning as well, but community health clinics are rarely looped in. The new program customizes this type of planning for individual clinics, providing funding for ice packs, saline drips, and nausea medication as well as recommendations for how the clinics can help their patients navigate heat outside the clinic walls.  

The program also aims to bridge divides between clinicians and local public health officials and emergency management departments in order to make sure local resources are directed to the right places. “Clinics often don’t think of themselves as being an important entity when it comes to emergency response broadly,” said Nate Matthews-Triggs, associate director of climate and disaster resilience at Americares and the head of the project. “But now as we’re seeing more and more extreme weather related to climate change, they’re finding themselves on the front lines.” 

For example, many cities set up cooling centers during heat waves to help keep residents without air conditioners cool, but those cooling centers often sit empty, even as hospitals fill up with patients suffering from heatstroke. That’s because a lot of people either don’t know about the cooling centers or don’t have a way to get to them. Many clinics, particularly in underserved areas, have contracts with non-emergency patient transportation — vans and buses paid for by the city or funded by the clinics to help patients get to their medical appointments. “Can they leverage those relationships to help their patients get to cooling centers?” Matthews-Triggs asked. That’s one of the interventions the program plans to try out over the next couple of years. Clinicians will also work with emergency managers to make sure air-conditioning units are being provided to those who need them most. Additionally, participating clinicians will teach community aid workers, like soup kitchen volunteers, to be able to identify symptoms of heat-related illness. 

The Climate Health Equity for Community Clinics Program, with just 10 clinics in three states, is tiny right now. There are tens of thousands of health clinics across the U.S. with varying degrees of preparedness for the health impacts of climate change. Even when the program expands to its expected 100 clinics, its efforts will just be a drop in the bucket. Heat-related illnesses pose a threat to communities in every state in the nation — hundreds of millions of Americans. But experts not involved in the program told Grist that the initiative seems promising. 

“Anything that can help better identify who is in need of what and where the resources are, and connect those two things, is going to be helpful in managing the response to any sort of crisis event,” said Samantha Penta, an associate professor in the department of emergency management and homeland security at the University of Albany. Clinicians, who are often seen as trustworthy by the community, are well-positioned to coordinate resources and bridge gaps between local officials and aid groups once the heat has descended. Americares and Harvard plan to use the information they gather between now and 2025 to bolster community-level responses to extreme heat, first in the U.S. and later in middle- and low-income countries around the globe. 

“If they find this is a useful resource, then it’s probably something that we want to see spread,” Penta said. “Everything has to start somewhere.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As heat-related deaths rise, a new program puts community clinics on the front lines on Oct 10, 2023.