London Climate Action Week was supposed to be a confab to figure out how to lower emissions. Instead, it’s a textbook example of how the world is being forced to adapt to increasingly extreme heat.
“London isn’t just calling—it’s cooking,” said United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday, while giving a keynote speech at the event.
The UK Met Office is expecting temperatures to reach 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, a mark that would smash the June record and flirt with the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country. The UK isn’t alone: A deadly heatwave is sweeping across Europe, with countries shuttering schools and nuclear plants and rail operators curtailing operations to avoid overheating tracks.
“Our infrastructure is not set up for this temperature,” says Katie Glaze, sustainability director for infrastructure consultancy Brookbanks. She pulled out of around nine sessions on how to adapt buildings for extreme climate due to transport issues. “The irony is that a lot of the conferences I was going to attend, the topic of discussion is what is happening now,” she adds. “It’s all very future-thinking, but we have the situation now that we’re not addressing quickly enough.”
Europe is currently enveloped by an area of slow-moving high-pressure air. This traps warm air like a “lid on a pot” and creates a “heat dome” which blocks other weather fronts, like clouds and rain, from moving through. The air becomes hotter and hotter while the ground also warms, loses moisture, and becomes easier to heat even more. A higher starting temperature amid global warming has intensified the effect.
In London, organizers on Tuesday canceled an event on extreme heat because the library it would be hosted in doesn’t have air conditioning. The “very unpleasant” indoor conditions and hot journeys to the venue would have risked the wellbeing of speakers and guests, host the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance says.
Earthwatch Europe, meanwhile, called off events for families to explore local wildlife in Hammersmith Park “in a twist nobody wanted, but everyone can appreciate the irony of,” the charity wrote in a post on Facebook.
The festival was expected to attract 75,000 people across more than 1,000 events over nine days. But some attendees have chosen to stay away due to heat-related health concerns. London, like most cities, traps more heat than rural areas due to the high density of heat-absorbing material like concrete and tarmac and a lack of cooling vegetation.
Codirector of the Climate Majority Project Rupert Read decided not to go to London for the event because he has a heart condition, which can be exacerbated by heat. His organization moved events online.
“It is unbelievable that it has come to this,” he says, adding that London Climate Action Week will continue “with a sense of very real jeopardy hanging over it, because that is the reality now. This is climate breakdown in action.”
The UK government has warned the heatwave will strain public health systems and raise the risk of disease or even death. Last year, the government counted more than 1,500 heat-linked deaths across the country, with the elderly being the most vulnerable age group.
Charlotte Baker, who runs her own environment and public health consultancy and lives outside London, also canceled plans to attend a conference on making cities more livable this week because she has severe asthma triggered by pollen and air pollution. She was hospitalized by an asthma attack three years ago in high temperatures and doesn’t want to risk a repeat given the forecast of stagnant hot air that will trap air pollution.