Oh, thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

Heat waves are a silent killer, and the data is staggering.

Scientists who track this data say here in the US alone, thousands of people die each year due to extreme heat, almost unimaginable.

How can the wealthiest nation in the world have so many people losing their lives simply because it's too hot outside?

And these same scientists say many of the deaths go uncounted because those effective often have co-morbid illness or comorbid conditions.

So to find out why this is happening, how this is happening, we take a visit to Santa Ana, California, an urban Orange County city.

That's kind of a case study of what we're talking about, an example of how extreme heat affects cities all throughout the US with high minority and elderly populations, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and many residents who, well, they simply don't have much money or the resources to get help then.

We're going to explore the solutions that researchers are working on to put a stop to this preventable tragedy.

First, though, you're about to meet two amazing young women who are doing everything possible to inform the public about what's known as urban heat islands, city streets and freeways, sidewalks and parking lots, bridges and buildings and cars and concrete everywhere.

This is urban city life and parts of Southern California, like here in Santa Ana and all throughout the U.S., tens of millions of people live in communities with all these urban characteristics, commonly referred to as concrete jungles.

And within these concrete jungles are what's known as urban heat islands.

Urban heat islands are victims of the sun and all the concrete, gravel, sand, steel and glass of a city.

This combination can lead to temperatures far higher than the actual temperature of a city as registered on an air temperature thermometer.

So safer example.

It's a scorching 100 degree summer day in southern California.

The temperature in some of these urban heat islands in various SoCal cities can register well over 110 degrees, leaving many people vulnerable to heat, illness or death.

Every year there are news reports from all over the country documenting tragic loss of life due to extreme heat in places like assisted care facilities, nursing homes and apartment complexes where these tragic cases are happening routinely, everywhere from Los Angeles to New York.

This morning, an extreme heat wave sweeping across the western United States.

We are used to sun in southern California, but the heat is catching many off guard.

Parts of L.A. County will once again see temperatures above 100 degrees this afternoon.

The oppressive heat waves now gripping our nation are not only hotter, but also deadly.

Hundreds lost their lives and according to one report, most died alone in homes with no working air conditioning or fanned by.

These urban heat island effect, disadvantaged communities, poor people and the homeless, for example, more so than others.

And in cities where there is less park and greenspace, fewer trees, and far fewer options for shade.

And more natural spaces, you would have greater concentration of trees and other types of vegetation, and those both provide shade and also evaporative cooling.

And we don't have that as much of that in urban areas.

Edith de Guzman knows all about Urban Heat Island.

Edith has a background in urban planning as an environmental researcher, formerly director of research at the Los Angeles based nonprofit Tree People, and now a PhD student at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

We have asphalt streets, we have asphalt parking lots, we have roofs, we have buildings.

So we've created modifications that create opportunities for heat to be retained, built up during the day, and then actually released during the night.

We generate our own heat in urban areas, whether it's air conditioning units, car engines, other types of machinery.

All of those actually produce and release heat.

Edith works with people from all backgrounds and all walks of life to find climate solutions in urban areas.

In addition to all of her research, Edith's work includes everything from demonstration projects to public planning in the fields of urban forestry, heat mitigation and urban watershed management.

Edith co-founded the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative and currently is a director there.

The collaborative is a multidisciplinary national partnership of researchers like herself and expert practitioners from the world of nonprofits, academia and government agencies to achieve a cooler, more prosperous and healthier Los Angeles and Southern California.

Together, her team is learning as much as possible about best practices to implement urban cooling strategies.

Edith says as the average daily temperatures increase, she is greatly concerned about the overwhelming amounts of fatalities from heat stress.

In an average year, extreme heat kills more people than all other weather related causes combined.

So think about lightning, tornadoes, cold weather.

In an average year, heat will kill more people than all of those combined.

There have been really massive heat waves that have killed many, many hundreds or thousands of people.

For example, the historic heat wave of Chicago in 1995 over a few days killed about 700 people just in that area.

In Los Angeles County, for example, which is our most populous county of 10 million people.

And on average, L.A. County in the summer has about 150 people die each day when we have extended heat waves is when we really begin to see the impacts on public health and hospitalizations, emergency room visits, and ultimately, some of those folks end up succumbing to the heat.

We met Edith Grisman here in Santa Ana, a city in Orange County, California, of almost 350,000 people with the highest homeless population in the U.S. Over 70% of the people living in Santa Ana are Latino, and almost 20% of the population is without health insurance.

The average income per person here is less than $25,000 a year, and nearly 20% of this population lives in what the U.S. Census Bureau considers poverty.

Edith explains that Santa Ana is considered an urban heat island, partly due to the city's demography and geography.

Santa Ana is an urban heat island because it's urban.

So if you live in an urban area, congrats, relations.

You live on an island, an urban heat island in the US.

That's 80% of the population.

But in California, it's more than 90%.

And in Southern California, it's even higher than that because we have a really built out megalopolis of like 20 million people.

And so we've created the conditions to retain rather than dissipate that heat.

Populations are disadvantaged when it comes to being affected by heat waves.

So with a lot of residents being low income and a lot of Santa Ana residents experiencing homelessness, a lot of signs point to Santa Ana being an urban heat island.

Monica Mowat is a Santa Ana resident.

This 25 year old grad student has lived here all her life.

Monica is the daughter of a Mexican-American dad and a Korean-American mom.

Even as a kid, her parents were concerned about urban heat islands years ago.

Monica's dad worked for the Santa Ana Parks and Rec Department his entire life and knew that Monica's health and well-being could be compromised if she didn't spend part of each day in the shade playing, walking or hiking in neighborhood parklands and greenspace areas away from the Santa Ana concrete jungle.

And while Monica was afforded this opportunity, she recognized that too many of her childhood friends were not.

A lot of Santa Ana youth have to deal with concrete and synthetic turf surfaces that don't relieve kids of extreme heat.

I was privileged enough to go to a well-funded charter school, and we had a physical education program that was innovative and implemented local green spaces.

Only 4% of Santa Ana's land is used for parks and recreation.

So much more could be done to help alleviate extreme heat for disadvantaged communities.

When the city itself listens to its residents and changes the budget.

Today, Monica has dedicated her young life to giving back to her community.

And in part that's finding solutions to the urban heat islands of these concrete jungles.

Recently, Monica was appointed as a commissioner for the Parks Recreation and Community Services Commission for the City of Santa Ana, where she is personally trying to effect change and have her agency be a change agent.

In the next fiscal year.

The park deficiency will only increase with the way that the city is planning on budgeting for parks and Recreation.

The City Council of Santa Ana has a lack of prioritization when it comes to allocating funds to the Parks and Recreation Department.

As a commissioner, I want to advocate for community outreach.

I want the city to listen to its residents who understand that open green space helps relieve residents of extreme heat.

While Monica Mode is all about using public policy to try and effect change with regards to extreme heat and the urban heat Island challenge, Edith de Guzman is all about the science, Edith insists.

Climate change is a major contributor to Urban Heat Island, and she also says that wildfires resulting from climate change worsen this extreme heat threat, which she says is putting so many people at risk.

Over the past decade, there have been several massive wildfires in Orange County, just south of Santa Ana, especially around the Santiago Canyon and Silverado Canyon areas.

And these fires have not just occurred during the summer months.

Edith says Southern California has the unfortunate honor of being the North American region, where heat related deaths happen all throughout the year.

We have variable climates, so it's 50, 60 degrees.

You know, most days in January, February, and then all of a sudden you have a Santa Ana wind coming in and you've got three or four days of 95 degree weather.

Our infrastructure is not necessarily adapted, but our physiology is also not adapted.

So our bodies can get really thrown off that can really wreak havoc on the body and its ability to respond to extreme.

We can make modifications to the urban environment without, you know, asking everybody to move out of the city.

We can just equip the city to be better with extreme heat.

That means having more opportunities for that heat to be reflected back out rather than retained.

So being really smart about highly reflective surfaces, whether they're pavements, streets, roofs, even walls, having more vegetation, more shade, evaporative cooling, and just letting letting folks know that this is actually a very increasingly risky impact that can be experienced in their communities.

Thank you, Guzman and Monica, for their comprehensive explanation of urban heat islands.

Now we must talk about solutions because that is what we do here on this program.

And joining me to discuss all of this further and help identify some of those solutions is Dr. Allen Barak.

Dr. Barak is a Ph.D. and environmental and health economist and also an associate professor at UCLA.

Before that, he worked in the economics department at Tulane University in New Orleans and has published several articles about the environment and human health.

And he investigates the reasons why people living in certain climates have more economic advantages and better health than others.

Allen, thank you so much for being here.

Greatly appreciated.

Thanks for having me.

Definitely.

Now let's really broaden out the discussion.

We just heard Edith de Guzman in my field report.

She talked about climate change.

I know you study in-depth and research climate change, particularly how this impacts the elderly.

So why the elderly more so than others, if that is the case?

And Allan, your data is correct.

When it comes to more extreme outcomes like hospitalizations and death, the elderly really are the most vulnerable group.

Extreme heat puts strain on our cardiovascular system, and we all know as you age or cardiovascular system deteriorates and is just less capable of handling any extra strain.

The estimates vary, but the best best estimate is that about 5000 people die each year in the United States as the result of exposure to to extreme heat.

Now, that's that is definitely a big number, but it would be a lot higher if it wasn't for air conditioning.

Some of my own research has found that that air conditioning, the app add a teaspoon of air conditioning, has reduced deaths in the United States by something like 80%.

So that means that we have something like 20,000 deaths in the U.S. if it weren't for air conditioning.

So air conditioning needs to be a part of the conversation when we're talking about adapting to extreme heat, adapting to the urban heat island effect and adapting to climate change just a bit more, more broadly.

But if we're going to talk about air conditioning, we also need to talk about its expense and the fact that for, say, elderly on fixed incomes, that that running air conditioning is going to be an economic and economic strain.

So a small air conditioning unit may cost something like $1 per day to run a larger unit would cost something like $3 per day to run.

So if you're thinking about a, you know, a hot spell or a hot month, that could easily add 50 to $100 of added monthly expenses.

Now the average Social Security recipient gets something like 1500 dollars per month in income, and so 50 to $100 added expense on top of that is a real economic strain.

You know, it's interesting because you do mention air conditioning.

To me, it sounds like the simplest of things that air conditioning, obviously cities from what I read, don't mandate that.

Let's say apartment owners have air conditioning units for the renters.

How could we get air conditioning to people more efficiently?

And besides the air conditioning, what are some other really simple solutions?

Alan Things that aren't that big a deal but can get done quickly.

You ask a great question.

As a renter, you might not live in one place long enough to recoup a large investments or large renovation costs, like installing a central air conditioning, and not to mention that you might not have legal authority or permission from your landlord to do so.

So it does seem like incentivizing landlords to make those improvements and install install air conditioning is going to be an important policy solution.

And they can do that through subsidies to the landlords to help help offset some of the high costs of installing central air conditioning or changes in building codes that that mandate that that rentals have to have at least one window unit.

But that might not be politically popular.

So I think perhaps one simpler solution would be instead to just provide subsidies to the renters directly themselves to ensure that they have the funds to actually install at least one window unit themselves.

And and maybe if they put that in, you know, like the bedroom, that would ensure that they have one cool place to go and escape the heat during during the day, but also if it's in the bedroom it could help ensure that they have somewhere to sleep at night when sleep is is important for for your health.

But if we're going to talk about about helping ensure that the elderly have access to air conditioning, we also again need to talk about the cost and policy solutions to dealing with those those high costs.

And so I think one one important avenue for policymakers to explore is to think about possibly sending $50 checks every month during the hot summer months to low income seniors.

And, you know, that could be sent directly or it could be in the term and in the form of an electricity rebate.

And what about even simpler things?

I mean, planting trees or having more areas with shade?

I don't know why this is such a complicated solution.

And no one can figure out how to solve.

Planting trees, providing straight at shaded structures, and just generally changing the way we build our homes and our cities is important for reducing the urban heat island effect.

But I don't view these types of interventions as singular solutions to protecting the elderly.

We might be able to reduce outdoor temperatures by as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit, and that that could be important in dropping someone's exposure from, say, 110 degrees Fahrenheit on those really, really hot days to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that's still particularly dangerous for an elderly person.

So what we really need, as I said before, is to be providing air conditioning in homes of the elderly to meet them where they're at.

Though I should say that these these solutions that do provide what might seem like incremental changes in in the temperature, so dropping temperatures by, you know, five or ten degrees, those could have huge payoffs to everyone in the city first, in the sense that they will lead to people using less electricity and that means less energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The things that are actually contributing to climate change itself.

But second, what's that's going to translate into is actually lower expenses for people living in the city.

So so it's possible that some of these interventions could pay for themselves and lower electricity costs.

To me, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like this is sort of a public policy issue.

In other words, why don't we simply have better communications with city leaders and the respective city residents to sort of help identify?

You mentioned old folks, elderly people, who's most at risk?

And this way we can maybe implement a better public policy.

You are a scientist here in the world of academia, Scott and Matt and you.

I know me as a reporter.

I am livid when I hear these city leaders, these county leaders, these politicians, They give a lot of promises when they're running for office and then when they are in office, it seems like they forget the forgotten people.

Why can't we fix this with better public policy?

Please tell me about.

The people that are most vulnerable to climate change.

Elderly renters say living inland and in one of the hotter parts of California or the U.S..

Living inland, away from the, you know, the temperate coastal climate, They haven't had a lot of political power in California.

And I say nothing.

You know, exhibits that more than we when we get into Bates debates over housing density in California.

I we know that that increasing housing density along the coast especially and in nicer climates would lead to a protecting people from extreme heat and B just overall reduction in energy consumption and and reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the future, which would be good for reducing future climate change.

So we know that those are good.

Yet it seems politically impossible to actually increase housing density in California and some of these these wealthier coastal areas.

You were talking about the elderly.

Do you have any data, any research on climate change in children?

You know, in some ways, pregnant women and children are vulnerable to extreme heat just in the same way as the elderly are vulnerable.

You know, it impacts their cardiovascular system.

But you pregnant women are uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat due to a hormone called oxytocin.

It's also known as the love hormone.

And oxytocin regulates the onset of labor for pregnant women.

And oxytocin also increases in our bodies when it's hot outside.

So what that means is pregnant women, especially those, you know, nearing their due date in their third trimester, can can risk delivering early due to extreme heat.

So I wanted to look into this this particular concern.

And I collected, you know, pretty big data set to do so, collected 50 million birth records from the United States going back to 1969 and data that spanned the entire United States.

And what we found in the data is that when it's particularly hot outside and, you know, days that the temperature got above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, that there were were more births.

And what that you know, what that means is that pregnant women are delivering and delivering earlier than they would have otherwise if it if it wasn't so hot outside.

And if you calculate, you know, exactly how many days earlier these children are born, it turns out to be, you know, like on average about six days.

But in some of the more extreme cases, it's something like, you know, it can be upwards of two weeks early.

And that's you know, that may not seem like a lot, but it's but it's enough to put children at risk of some serious health complications.

You know, there's a lot of data to suggest that being born early puts you at risk, though it's rarer of of of, you know, of dying.

It also puts you at risk of, you know, being admitted to the intensive care unit when you're born.

And then, you know, maybe as you age, as you get, you know, you get older, it puts you a risk of having asthma, maybe due to the lingering health impacts at birth.

So that's just one way in which extreme heat can impacts impact children and children out there, you know, at the earliest point of their lives at birth.

But extreme heat, you know, there's there's evidence suggest it can, you know, impact children at other points in their life, you know, maybe especially you know in the classroom and impede impedes their learning.

Yeah.

There is the other argument that heat hot weather is good.

Every California is racing out to the beach, to a biking trail, to a hiking trail.

When it's scorching outside New Yorkers, everyone wants to be in Miami Beach or retire in West Palm is an assignment be said for a lot of sun and a lot of hot weather.

Yes and no.

It you know, it does make sense that people want to live in California and Florida because of the because of the weather.

You know, cold weather.

You know, cold winters can be brutal.

They're physiologically taxing, you know, puts a lot of strain on your cardiovascular system.

You know, in my research, I have also found that that cold weather causes an increase in and risk of dying.

So so there is something to to your your point, some level of hot weather is good in the sense that it just means less extremely cold weather.

But there's tipping points with everything.

You know, once the temperature starts to, you know, surpass 90 degrees, I really puts a lot of strain on on elderly and they are quite, quite vulnerable.

You know the people you you mentioned, I imagine, you know, those people moving to California and Florida, I imagine some of those people have have the wealth and the ability to afford a home with air conditioning and actually to afford the higher electricity bills.

And also people out, you know, hiking or enjoying the beach are able bodied people, maybe maybe younger people.

But they're you know, we should still be concerned about the elderly, the elderly, you know, and the immobile that are suffering in silence, you know, inside their homes, the ones we're just not seeing.

That's what that's what has me concerned.

Alan, one final question in our remaining minutes.

Now, don't be offended with the question.

I ask tough questions.

I'm fair and balanced, not left, not right.

I'm centrists.

So in all fairness, you've heard this criticism all too often.

Many folks say you, your colleagues, scientists, and certainly a lot of conservatives will point this out.

They've told me this in stories I've reported on.

But they say you're a typical scientist these days.

You're sort of directing this liberal narrative, an agenda, so to speak.

Are they fair and simply asking you, how can you be certain that all of this extreme heat, all of what you have just talked about, is a direct result of climate change?

I mean, these days it literally seems like, okay, it's raining outside, it's climate change, it's snowing outside, it's climate change, it's cold outside, it's climate change, it's hot outside, it's climate change.

Everything is climate change.

Talk about the criticism you deal with constantly.

I can understand people's fatigue from hearing about the negative consequences of climate change.

You know, frequently it can be anxiety inducing.

You know, as researchers, we you know, we are hunting for all the ways that climate change will play out, that all the connections because, you know, because once we know all those connections, it means that we can better adapt and help actually reduce the costs of climate change, you know, knowing, you know, who and who is impacted by extreme heat and in what ways can help us adapt.

So in my own case, you know, thinking about ways that we can protect the elderly and help offset some of the costs of of using air conditioning is is one way we can we can investigate to to, you know, to reduce the costs of climate change.

You know, knowing how, you know, extreme heat impacts pregnant women, especially those, you know, in their third trimester, is is important for thinking about when and when how we can intervene to help those women and the children to be born.

So just knowing those things is is important for for identifying ways to keep the costs of climate change down.

And I think, you know, liberals and conservatives, we can all agree that we want to keep the costs of climate change down and we can all agree that we especially want to protect those that are most vulnerable to climate change and keep the costs down for them.

Dr. Alan Borrego What can I say?

Thank you so much for a great discussion so greatly it.

Thank you for having me.

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Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.