Reimagining Government S4E1: From Heatwaves to City Hall: Eleni Myrivili’s Vision for Climate-Resilient Cities

Adrian Brown: [00:00:00] Hello, Adrian here. You may have already heard that after 10 years, I’ve stepped down as Executive Director at the Centre for Public Impact. With this, I’m sad to say that I’ve also stepped down as host of Reimagining Government. It has been a great pleasure to host this podcast over the years, showcasing so many of the incredible trailblazers in governance worldwide.

However, rest assured that this podcast is here to stay. We have a brand new series for you, hosted by two incredible people from the CPI team, Gabrielle Beran and Kandice Louis. They’ll be diving into the crucial topics of climate and gender with the help of some notable experts in these fields. I want to wish Gabrielle and Kandice the very best of luck, and I will definitely be listening along for the final time.

To the audience of Reimagining [00:01:00] Government, thank you for listening to the podcast. It’s been a real pleasure to host it. I’ve been Adrian Brown. Goodbye.

Eleni Myrivili: Heat has this amazing capacity, like a ghost, to go into houses, to go into working places, to go into cities and find the people that are the most vulnerable, the poorest, and hit them the hardest. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Welcome back to Reimagining Government, the podcast from the Centre for Public Impact. I’m your host, Kandice Louis-Wilson, Senior Program Director at CPI.

Gabrielle Beran: I’m Gabrielle Barron, Senior Program Manager in the Climate Action Team at CPI. We are this season’s hosts of Reimagining Government. This season, we’re asking a bold question, what if tackling climate change starts with rethinking who holds power. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Across six episodes, we’re hearing from leaders who are reshaping how we [00:02:00] respond to the climate crisis from city halls to rainforests, grassroots movements to global negotiations.

Gabrielle Beran: Super exciting to be talking to some people who absolutely are walking the talk in the next few episodes.

Every year extreme weather events are increasing as global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius. When heat rises, cities and rural areas feel the effects. Across the globe, long intense heat waves are becoming increasingly common, putting massive pressure on our cities. Roads buckle, transport, systems falter, and health services are stretched more than ever.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: But extreme heat doesn’t always grab headlines the way floods or wildfires do. It’s often invisible, but that doesn’t mean it’s less deadly. 

Gabrielle Beran: And the devastating effects of extreme heat aren’t felt equally. The people most impacted are often those already disadvantaged. Women, children, people who are [00:03:00] pregnant, elderly, work outdoors. That’s why for this season of Reimagining Government, we’re focusing on the intersection of climate and gender. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: This was the core of a precedent-setting court case last year, when a Swiss group of activists known as KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, took their government to the European Court of Human Rights. Arguing that the Swiss government had failed to meet its obligations to protect its citizens from the effects of climate change. 

Alain Chablais (Court Representative for Switzerland): Perhaps a historic judgment that will probably attract the attention of, uh, many countries outside Switzerland. 

sfx: I am so happy because we, we could, we could do something, could, um, contribute to the future, to a better future for our children.

Gabrielle Beran: A 2023 study by medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that if the global mean temperature continues to rise to just under two degrees Celsius, we may face a 370% rise in heat-related deaths, [00:04:00] most of which would occur among the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Southeast Asia and in Africa. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: In Ahmedabad, a city in Western India, hot summers have become the new normal. Temperatures now reach levels that can prove fatal even after just a few hours of exposure. To mitigate these risks, policymakers are piloting initiatives like giving smart watches to residents and vulnerable neighbourhoods to monitor their health. 

Gabrielle Beran: This is just one example of how governments are trying to adapt to increasing heat. But are we taking extreme heat as seriously as other adverse weather events?

Kandice Louis-Wilson: In this episode, we’re gonna discuss how cities can become more climate-ready and resilient in the face of rising heat. We’ll be talking with Eleni Myrivili, Global Chief Heat Officer at the UN-Habitat. You’ll hear our chat with Eleni after this break.

Talking Headways Podcast: Want to learn more about cities, sustainable transportation, and good urban design? Listen in to Talking Headways at Streetsblog USA, one [00:05:00] of the longest-running transportation and urban planning shows in the United States. Hear authors, city officials, advocates, and more, discuss ways we can shape our urban environments.

Find Talking Headways wherever you get your podcasts and much more at usa.streetsblog.org. 

Gabrielle Beran: Welcome back to Reimagining Government. 

Eleni Myrivili: My name is Eleni Myrivili, and I am right now in Greece. My base is in Athens, Greece, and my title is Global Chief Heat Officer. And I’ve been working with UN-Habitat, and increasingly now with UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Program, trying to help cities deal with extreme heat.

Gabrielle Beran: And why are cities such important places for tackling climate action, and particularly for our rising heat levels? 

Eleni Myrivili: So climate change is happening all around the world, but there are some places that [00:06:00] are more impacted by extreme weather events. I mean, everywhere is impacted by extreme weather events nowadays, but there are some places that are kind of hotspots for extreme weather. Like, for example, the southern United States, right from all of these hurricanes and tornadoes that are becoming intensified by extreme heat and by a lot of humidity that gathers in the atmosphere, which makes these, uh, phenomena incredibly more strong and dangerous. 

News Reporter: Good day, everyone. We are coming on the air with breaking news about Hurricane Milton, the storm we’ve been talking about for days, a powerful category four storm.

As of this moment, it has already started spawning a series of dangerous tornadoes touching down throughout South Central Florida. 

Eleni Myrivili: Similarly, we have heat around the tropics, which is really becoming more and more dangerous for the people, lives and livelihoods there. And, uh, we have, especially, for [00:07:00] example, one of the countries that we know is suffering a lot from extreme heat is India.

Because we have a lot of heat around that part of the world. But also in India, we have large, large cities with tons of people living in conditions often that are not particularly supported by infrastructure that can help people survive very high temperatures. So we have a lot of people living, for example, in formal settlements around these cities.

Like we have people fleeing either difficult economic conditions, or exactly because of extreme weather conditions, or because of sea level rise, or because of war. And they are very exposed to extreme weather events. 

Another aspect is that all cities around the world are heating up almost twice as fast as the global average, because the way that we’ve been building cities has been, to a large extent, dependent on fossil [00:08:00] fuels and the fossil fuel economy, thinking that we could heat and cool them at will.When we are very hot, we’ll turn our air conditioning, and when we’re very cold, we’ll turn on heat. 

The other aspects are the materials that we use, which are asphalt and cement and concrete and glass, and all these things that basically absorb heat during the day and radiate during the night, which make our cities much hotter than the surrounding areas, which usually have more green and have more kind of natural aspects to them.And this is what we call the urban heat island. 

Also, the way we design cities often do not take into consideration how we can make sure that winds can traverse our cities so that we have more natural cooling. They don’t take into consideration shading, so that again, we can have people actually be in public spaces and feel more comfort.

And finally the last thing is that humans create heat. By using cars [00:09:00] and using air conditioning which pump more heat in the air.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: I really appreciated how you talked about how in the south part of the United States, which is where I’m from, the struggles with the hurricanes. I’ve seen hurricanes just completely evolve. Now we’re having hurricanes with tornadoes, flash flooding. And so you told us that you’re based in Athens, which I know has suffered like periods of extreme heat over the years.

How have you dealt with that firsthand and how has it affected you and, and how do you feel like your neighbours, your friends in the city, are responding to this increase in heat? 

Eleni Myrivili: We are starting to see tiny little tornadoes, which are a new kind of phenomenon in the Aegean Sea, but they’re just strange kind of occurrences, and they’re not particularly destructive.

We have seen floods, a sudden kind of pouring of rain that is concentrated in a very short period of time, where all of the infrastructure [00:10:00] cannot handle it. And we’ve seen extreme heat and wildfires, and these are the main kind of things that we’re struggling with. 

News Reporter: Firefighters used helicopters to battle intense flames and smoke near Athens, Greece, on Saturday.

Soaring temperatures fueled the wildfires across the country. Several homes were destroyed and residents were ordered to evacuate. At least five people were hospitalised due to the fires. More than 50 wildfires have broken out across the country since Friday. 

Eleni Myrivili: Extreme heat has this extraordinary quality of being what we call a silent killer, which means that we don’t really see what happens. And in Greece in particular, but in many countries around the world, we don’t really know how many people have died from it.

So this is a very big issue. How do you know what the impact is? And we’ve just started gathering these types of, of information. [00:11:00] A very, very small percentage of people that die from heat, die from heat stroke. People die from heat that have a preexisting cardiovascular problems, or respiratory problems, or kidney or diabetes, or any kind of preexisting conditions, get so much worse when we’re dealing with extreme heat or psychological issues.

And mental health is another extraordinary vulnerability that deteriorates very fast during extreme heat. We have many more suicides. We have community-based violence and gender-based violence, which also goes up during extreme heat. The other thing which is wildfires. You lived in Los Angeles, the most extreme version of it, because so many communities were devastated from the LA fires. But now we have France dealing with extraordinary amounts of forest that it’s been losing this summer. Right now, they’ve managed to put most fires under control. But it’s been an [00:12:00] absolutely devastating summer for France. And in Greece, Athens, we’ve been dealing a lot with very urban fires for the last few years, and just losing a lot of forests. This is like devastating because a lot of people’s houses get lost and communities suffer from being, you know, burned because they’re near or within, you know, villages, within forests. People have to be dislocated, but also people lose their jobs because they’re linked to, uh, forests and forestry.

But also, it’s really super important because all of these jobs also help manage forests. Like we need people to be going into forests and to have reasons to go in and take out dry matter, to kind of use for other things. And, uh, recently, because people are moving away from the countryside, increasingly, at least in Europe we have forests that have been abandoned, which means that there’s so much more dry matter, [00:13:00] biomass that is ready to ignite. And that’s why we see also, that’s part of why we see these extraordinary fires that are really difficult to put under control. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: I went to Southern France last year, I was in Luchon and that was a thing, and I had never resonated with anything other than wildfires other than the Western United States ight, and then, you know, in South and Central America. So to see that phenomenon happening, it just speaks to what you said, this greater issue with heat. But I wanna circle back to something that you said earlier that is a special interest of me as a person who comes from the gender-based violence world.

You talk about how heat affects people unequally and how it impacts things like gender-based violence. Why is this, and what are the structural reasons behind that? 

Eleni Myrivili: Women are more vulnerable to heat. On many different levels, if you compare them to men, the percentage of women that we lose from heat is higher than the percentage of men.

So we know that physiologically also, they are more affected because they go through different types of [00:14:00] periods in their lives that create different types of vulnerability. As, for example, when they’re pregnant. But also we know that they’re much more vulnerable economically and socio-culturally. So economically, they’re more vulnerable because they work longer times under conditions of heat.

They work both for wages, but they also work unpaid for many, many hours, taking care of the rest of the family, which usually needs care. So we have longer times, longer periods of exposure for women than with men, and longer periods of vulnerability. So, we see that, especially in the Global South, we have extraordinary increase of exposure and vulnerability for women in cities in the Global South. But also, socially and, and culturally their lives get much more harder when they’re dealing with extreme heat. For example, women have to go much farther distances when there’s extreme [00:15:00] heat to make sure that the family has access to water. It’s usually women that get water. 

Women are the ones that are, uh, responsible for providing food. Often they don’t eat food to make sure that everybody else has food. So with food comes hydration. A big part of our hydration is through food. So women often struggle from hydration because they don’t eat as much as the rest of the members of the family to make sure that everybody else eats.

And also another aspect is, for example, if they work outdoors, which a lot of women have the lowest-paying jobs in agriculture. When they are working outdoors, they don’t feel safe to go to the bathrooms, so they end up not drinking enough water, so they dehydrate themselves or they have to wear more clothes and be more covered, which also increases sometimes the temperature of the body. Or they, there’s all of these different ways that women are more impacted by heat and [00:16:00] more in danger from heat.

News Reporter: According to a study cited by the Mayo Clinic, more people go to the emergency room for psychiatric and mental health-related concerns when it’s hot out. The American Psychiatric Association reports depression and suicide increase in extreme heat, along with aggression, domestic violence reports, and substance abuse.

Eleni Myrivili: We know that violence goes up when we have, uh, heat rising and we know that communal violence goes up. We know it from ourselves. We get more pissed off with things when we are under conditions of extreme heat. We are so much more, uh, ready to pick a fight. 

And so I think that the more pressure you put in the family, uh, both because you know you are hot. Secondly, especially if the family is dealing with pressures from labour, because there’s less productivity, there’s less money coming in because of heat. There’s more tension between usually the couple, and so this ends up in conditions where [00:17:00] often women end up being the victims of frustration that come from all of these compounded problems that happen when we have extreme heat, and which brings around economic and again, socio, sociocultural challenges.

Gabrielle Beran: You really described there some of those impacts and how women do tend to be impacted more by heat. Do you think, because extreme heat affects those who are already marginalized, women, older adults, lower income communities. Do you think that’s why it gets less attention? Is it that power structure that’s at play there, or what else from your experience is the reason that heat, as you said earlier, is sometimes not taken so seriously by city officials or government?

Eleni Myrivili: I am afraid that this is very true. I think it’s easier for people to disregard because the impacts are hit, hit [00:18:00] harder the people that are marginalized and the marginalized community. We know this in every respect. It’s women, it’s people of colour, the poorest people in our communities, and this we see in general in relation, Gabrielle, to all climate issues, right?

It’s not just heat, but heat has this amazing capacity like a ghost, to go into houses, to go into working places, to go into cities and find the people that are the most vulnerable, the poorest, and hit them the hardest. So, if we get governments that do not understand issues of equity as issues of democracy and issues of survival of our societies, then you know, we have people that basically do not do the right thing.

And do not understand leadership as leadership should be understood, which is to actually protect people, and make sure that people have lives and livelihoods that [00:19:00] are not precarious and, and that they can depend on. 

Gabrielle Beran: And you’ve beautifully drawn together all those threads there Eleni, that this is an issue of democracy.

It’s an issue of decent, safe work. It’s an issue of health. It’s an issue of mental health, and safety, and preventing violence. That also just shows you how completely systemic these extreme weather events are. And sometimes as humans, we think we are separate from the natural world and that we can control, but we are being very much showed up here. In the face of events like wildfires, like extreme heat, any extreme weather, what are the things you are seeing governments do that are positive, and what are some things that you think, wow, we really could be doing this? It wouldn’t be so difficult. Why is this not happening? 

Eleni Myrivili: So some of the stuff that have been happening, which is really stunning, the last two, three years, is how much more awareness people have about heat being dangerous.

I mean, we have managed in the [00:20:00] last two or three years to really both, you know, people that work in media and in journalism and in, you know, all of these. But also as you said, governments, one of the basic things that they’ve been doing is ramping up their early warning systems. 

The Met Office: Severe weathe can affect the UK, and when it does, here at the Met Office, we are responsible for issuing warnings to warn of the potential for impacts. Whether it’s from intense rain, strong winds, heavy snow, or another weather type. These warnings are designed to let people, businesses, governments, and emergency responders know what weather is in store, and what the impacts may be.

Eleni Myrivili: So early warning systems, is making sure that people have information and that they get warnings and they get information also about not only what is going on and how dangerous this is for their health, but also about what to do and how to take cover. 

And we [00:21:00] see it also through the UN. There has been a call of the Secretary General of the UN that has been talking about early warning systems for all, and there’s been a lot of work that comes both from UN agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, WMO, and the World Health Organization, and UN-Habitat and ILO, the International Labor Organization.

They’re all kinda working together to make sure that they put into place both meteorological stations where there aren’t any. So we have data in relation to heat, but also ways to translate them in ways that are meaningful for the people, and to make sure that people know when they’re in danger. So this is something that has been going well.

All governments should put a lot of investment into it because we do have, with very small amounts of money, we have an incredible impact on human lives and livelihoods. If we have the right information at the right time and reaching the right kind of people, [00:22:00] period. Harder examples and harder things that have not been happening, which should be happening, is redesigning our cities and making sure that we bring much more nature in our cities so that people can live in environments that are not so dangerous.

Again, some parts of the city often have a lot of green. Some parts of the cities don’t, and the parts of the cities that don’t have green areas are usually the poor parts of the cities. So the idea, again, of equity comes into place. But in general, bringing more nature into cities in every possible aspect and redesigning our cities.

Thinking of shading, and thinking of nature, and thinking of materials and preparing for heat is something that we’ve seen very little of. And we see it in usually fragmented pilot programs that are not really scaled up, and we don’t see the transformation that we wanna see. But we can learn from them, we can take knowledge from them because they’re really advanced on how to [00:23:00] design and how to finance and how to implement, uh, solutions for extreme heat.

We see it in some countries in Europe also, that they’ve been putting these types of logics into transforming their cities in the last couple of decades. Paris is a city that has been really amazing in the way that it’s been transforming itself for heat, and preparing itself for heat. 

Freetown in Sierra Leone, to go to Africa, has been an amazing city that with a great woman Mayor who is brilliant, working with a Chief Heat Officer who’s also brilliant, another woman, and they’ve been really transforming Freetown with the communities, working together with communities to make sure that they lower temperatures and they protect women workers and people that are the most exposed.

We have other examples that are great. Medellín, in Colombia, the city has been creating green corridors, but [00:24:00] basically supporting mobility that connects the poorest part of the town, which are informal housing that are near the, the mountains to the centre of the town. And kind of, this is the whole basic idea you have to bring equity, mobility. You have to bring equity in access to green places and access to places where people can work and can find jobs so that all of these things come together. So it’s a systemic approach that you have to have. And they also have created escalators for people that link the high and poor neighborhoods to the centre of the cities where the jobs are. But also hanging gondolas, which also connect the lower parts of the city to the top parts of the city where the informal settlements are. Creating infrastructure for those areas, making sure that people have access to the areas where jobs are, making sure that it’s cooler to walk, and cooler also to commute, and also [00:25:00] the capacity to absorb rainfall and to cool the city and to create more biodiversity. All of these different systems kind of are linked together. This is how cities should be thinking. 

Cities also are working to make sure that the cooling systems that they put, we have, uh, UNEP has created this global cooling pledge where different countries are pledging to make sure that the cooling systems and the different units that are imported and that are sold, are more sustainable and less technology, so that we have less greenhouse gas emissions and we actually contribute less to global warming. Cooling and AI and the big data centres are the two most electricity-demanding things that we have right now, and which are projected in the future to create incredible demand on electricity [00:26:00] and on fossil fuels. So we need to figure out how to control this and how to keep things a little bit within bounds, is super crucial as well. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: I was just reading in the newspaper that a high school in Georgia got a $52 million football stadium. So if we can invest $52 million in American football for a high school team, I think we can navigate and think through cooling systems. Because I think about, there’s a large outrage around Memphis, Tennessee, because one of the large AI plants is right outside of there, and it’s based right in a low-income community. That’s really close home to me because that’s where my mother’s from. And so the community out there is really upset. 

But they don’t have the language, hey don’t have the words, they don’t have the information to eloquently say what is going on? But they know people are getting sick. Their water is not correct. Their tanking systems is not working properly. There’s so much strain on an already broken and devastated system, but it’s impacting low-income [00:27:00] families.

I truly appreciate you flagging that and talking about the fact, the factors around AI and these big data systems. And how they are, you know, pulling from the economies and, and resources around them, but they’re typically planted in low-income neighbourhoods. They’re typically planted around people who don’t have the means, don’t have the information, don’t have the systems and infrastructures to make noise about it.

Um, so they’re dealing with that. And, um, it’s, it’s a, it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s genocide in a way, right? It’s a different way to continue to harm already vulnerable communities. So I really appreciated that flag, and I appreciated how you talked about the importance of that. 

Eleni Myrivili: Yeah, it’s a little scary because nobody seems to wanna regulate these things at this point.

They’re just in this crazy competition. Who’s going to do more AI first? I mean, it’s great, and I, you know, a lot of them, I see things that provide solutions for cities that are super important or provide solutions for biodiversity and how we can save, you know, really super [00:28:00] important ecosystems, or how can we deal with water resources, which are really, really crucial, and we can plug in AI to give us the right kind of solutions for things that otherwise it would take five years or ten years to figure out how to deal with.

So it’s really important. I’m not against it at all, but they have to be regulated. Somebody has to regulate these crazy guys that have all the money and are doing this. This kind of crazy who comes first thing. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Yeah. And unfortunately, the conversations on regulation are not about the actual harms of AI.

They’re about, you know, what they can be used for, who can use them, how can you use them in government, how can you use them, which is important, right? We need that there. There definitely needs to be a regulation, but at the bare bones piece of like the actual system itself is harmful and it’s damaging communities, is not on the table. And I think that’s the frustration that a lot of folks are having. Um, so yeah, I definitely, I definitely feel like we need to, to have that conversation. AI is great. I don’t wanna, I’m not [00:29:00] that person. I use AI, ChatGPT is like a, a friend of mine’s, right? But I also am, I’m aware of the dangers of that and aware of how the use and misuse of those tools are damaging, um, low-income communities and all parts of the world, ut specifically here in the south part of the United States. 

Eleni Myrivili: We should explain that these mega data centres need cooling. To be able to deal with processing all this kind of stuff, because when we talk about resources used, there’s both water and energy that can deplete if you don’t design it correctly.

News Reporter: According to new research from Purdue University, an average data centre uses 300,000 gallons of water every day, enough to supply a thousand homes. 

Gabrielle Beran: Sometimes, to me, it seems like it’s obvious, the cost saving in the long run of caring for your population, of not having to pay out insurance from disaster, the less stress on your healthcare system, the better, right, the cheaper? Why can we not mobilise [00:30:00] that saving now to implement solutions? 

Eleni Myrivili: Because the solutions are long-term. And the impacts and the benefits of the solution often do not come fast. They take time, and a lot of our elected representatives are shortsighted these days.

I don’t know who are the great leaders today that actually we see them planning for tomorrow and thinking of the long term effects that their decisions have on the people and on resources and on the future. I mean, in the jobs that we do, we kind of face these questions almost daily and we get lost in the minutiae of trying to make things a little bit better, which I think we should be doing.

But sometimes we look at the big picture and it’s like, how is that possible that they don’t think a little bit more. I mean, it’s not rocket science that we are undermining the basic things that we are depending [00:31:00] on, daily.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: We like to give all of our guests an opportunity to speak directly to the government figures and public service listening to this podcast right now. What do they need to learn? What do they need to know to help to continue to solve this problem? 

Eleni Myrivili: What I usually tell the people that come to the meetings that are from, uh, local government or other kind of governments is to be more daring, is to take risks, and that this is a time to actually follow your values and actually take risks and be bold, and be willing to take the heat and think about others and think of the next generations. But basically take risks and be bold and be daring. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Where can someone go to find out all the information about all these different cities that they could maybe even implore in their own cities as well? 

Eleni Myrivili: Usually they are embedded in [00:32:00] resources that are for cities to plan, uh, heat action plans. For example, there is the Heat Action Platform that is created by the Climate Resilience Center of the Atlantic Council.

Another resource that is great is C40, which is a city network and they have a great resource of cities that have been working for heat. The World Bank has been creating a heat handbook for cities, which also has a lot of examples from cities from the Global South. UN women has published things that also,several other UN agencies have created booklets that talk about specific vulnerabilities and vulnerable groups like UN kids and stuff that have to do with heat. And also tell you what different cities around the world have done. These are what come to mind right now, where people can find examples of how cities have been dealing with heat and best practices.[00:33:00] 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: This has been an amazing conversation. Thanks so much, and have a great day. 

Eleni Myrivili: You too. Have a good day. 

Gabrielle Beran: Wow. That was fun.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: It was. All of the resources that she shared. I, I took notes and it’ll probably be my weekend read. Um, me, me nerding out on, uh, on Google Scholar, uh, learning about what’s happening at Medellín, uh, and all the different cool projects that are happening. So amazing. Very amazing. 

Gabrielle Beran: I think the thing that was really interesting for me that I probably don’t spend enough time thinking about is the way our cities are built. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Yes.

Gabrielle Beran: And, and she really spelt that out. Like the, the fact that our cities have been constructed to heat and cool using electricity, which… 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Yes.

Gabrielle Beran: Most of which now is still from fossil fuels at whim. That’s a, that’s a crazy design feature.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Yes. Yeah. And even like accessibility, like elevators and other. 

Gabrielle Beran: Yes. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Things that require fossil fuels that are heating our systems. I also really appreciated how she talked about [00:34:00] the physiological and the cultural, um, aspects to gender-based violence and how that connects to heat.

She literally talked through just like the different jobs and the, the paid and the unpaid jobs and the idea that women are going to get water and they’re the people that wear the most clothes. And just down to the very simple layers of it. Ccause you know, we always think so big picture, we’re thinking like, oh, the, the bigger things the, the things that you know are making the headline news. It’s like no, their day-to-day is different. And that is such a big factor that plays into their vulnerability and to heat exhaustion. You know, those are things that you know, but they’re kind of sit in the back of your mind. But it was nice to have that like front, front of the mind conversation about it and like really draw to like what this actually means.

Being a person in the United States, we don’t think about that. I don’t walk anywhere to get my water. I go to my refrigerator, my, me and my refrigerator, and I pull out my, you know, my canteen or I go to a, a water fountain. So I think those are things that are just kind of like outta sight, outta mind, and I, I just don’t take [00:35:00] them in, into, um, an account when I’m thinking about those things.

Gabrielle Beran: If we’d had another hour, my goodness, we would’ve had even another hour of fascinating fun. I think the one thing we didn’t really get onto was around kind of community resilience. And I think something that at CPI, we’ve been working on in, in Australia and Melbourne in particular, where the city is, is heating up a bit, is encouraging community resilience for, for sort of social, um, cohesion and, and to encourage people to check on their neighbors and, and create those, the sort of social structures that we need in addition to, to physical and, and natural infrastructure.

Um, but it fully is a systemic issue, right?

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Absolutely. It absolutely is. I think the last part I wanna flag is just, hmm. The idea of thinking differently, being bold, uh, that was her message. 

Gabrielle Beran: Yes. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Uh, I, I love the simplicity of it. It wasn’t like, hey, you need to do these three things. This is your, you know, your levers for change and this is your theory of change, and it’s like nothing. It was just like, no. Think, be able to be bold. Think differently. Yeah, think outside of the normal [00:36:00] and be okay that that’s not gonna be accepted by other people, but know that it’s right. And so I, I really appreciated that reflection. Um, because sometimes, you know, we get these long laundry list of things and I’m like, no.

At, at the, at the most simple of it is to think differently and be bold. And I thought that was just profound and amazing and I just really appreciated the conversation and her perspective.

Gabrielle Beran: Thank you for listening to this episode of Reimagining Government. This is a special series on the intersection of climate and gender, brought to you by the Centre for Public Impact. If you want to learn more about the work that we do at CPI, check out our website centreforpublicimpact.org, and that’s centre spelled the british way, C-E-N-T-R-E.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: If you enjoyed this episode and are enjoying this series so far, please consider rating and reviewing on your podcast app. It only takes a few seconds and it helps us reach more people and keep the show going. It’s also just nice to be nice, so consider it your good deed for the day. 

Gabrielle Beran: I’m [00:37:00] Gabrielle. 

Kandice Louis-Wilson: And I’m Kandice, and we’ll see you next time.