Cities Will Soon Have “Chief Heat Officers” and Cloud-Seeding Drones

Back in May, Miami became the first city in the world to appoint a Chief Heat Officer to “implement solutions for extreme heat.” Now Athens, the hottest city in mainland Europe, has followed the example and appointed their own CHO to tackle this problem. The intent seems to be for this role to bring attention to initiatives such as increasing green spaces, implementing so-called “cool pavements,” and more public fountains or indoor places where people can go to cool off. Dubai is taking a different approach, funding a cloud-seeding program with drones that use electricity to actually create rain.

Bringing more attention to this urgent issue is important, so these efforts are all important. The problem, ironically, is buried at the end of one of the articles in a single sentence: “Freetown, Sierra Leone [will be] the next city on the list to appoint a chief heat officer, which will happen in November, when the southern hemisphere’s summer starts to kick in.”

As long as the world's governments are waiting until the problem is most extreme in order to take action, the problem of extreme heat will continue to get a lot worse.