Life-Threatening Heat Domes Are Confounding Forecasters
This phenomenon has also already struck Europe and China this summer, leading to the temporary closure of the Eiffel Tower and worries about wilting rice crops, respectively. But while heat domes are easy to identify once they strike, they remain difficult to forecast — a problematic prospect in a warming world.
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Washington Post
an hour ago
- Washington Post
Outdoor workers demand protection as cruel heat bakes southern Europe
Cruel heat is baking southern Europe as the continent slips deeper into summer. In homes and offices, air conditioning is sweet relief. But under the scorching sun, outdoor labor can be grueling, brutal, occasionally even deadly . A street sweeper died in Barcelona during a heat wave last month and, according to a labor union, 12 other city cleaners have suffered heatstroke since. Some of Europe's powerful unions are pushing for tougher regulations to protect the aging workforce from climate change on the world's fastest-warming continent .
Associated Press
2 hours ago
- Associated Press
Outdoor workers demand protection as cruel heat bakes southern Europe
Cruel heat is baking southern Europe as the continent slips deeper into summer. In homes and offices, air conditioning is sweet relief. But under the scorching sun, outdoor labor can be grueling, brutal, occasionally even deadly. A street sweeper died in Barcelona during a heat wave last month and, according to a labor union, 12 other city cleaners have suffered heatstroke since. Some of Europe's powerful unions are pushing for tougher regulations to protect the aging workforce from climate change on the world's fastest-warming continent. Cleaning the hot streets Hundreds of street cleaners and concerned citizens marched through downtown Barcelona last week to protest the death of Montse Aguilar, a 51-year-old street cleaner who worked even as the city's temperatures hit a June record. Fellow street sweeper Antonia Rodríguez said at the protest that blistering summers have made her work 'unbearable.' 'I have been doing this job for 23 years and each year the heat is worse,' said Rodríguez, 56. 'Something has to be done.' Extreme heat has fueled more than 1,000 excess deaths in Spain so far in June and July, according to the Carlos III Health Institute. 'Climate change is, above all, playing a role in extreme weather events like the heat waves we are experiencing, and is having a big impact in our country,' said Diana Gómez, who heads the institute's daily mortality observatory. Even before the march, Barcelona's City Hall issued new rules requiring the four companies contracted to clean its streets to give workers uniforms made of breathable material, a hat and sun cream. When temperatures reach 34 C (93 F), street cleaners now must have hourly water breaks and routes that allow time in the shade. Cleaning work will be suspended when temperatures hit 40 C (104 F). Protesters said none of the clothing changes have been put into effect and workers are punished for allegedly slacking in the heat. They said supervisors would sanction workers when they took breaks or slowed down. Workers marched behind a banner reading 'Extreme Heat Is Also Workplace Violence!' and demanded better summer clothing and more breaks during the sweltering summers. They complained that they have to buy their own water. FCC Medio Ambiente, the company that employed the deceased worker, declined to comment on the protesters' complaints. In a previous statement, it offered its condolences to Aguilar's family and said that it trains its staff to work in hot weather. Emergency measures and a Greek cook In Greece, regulations for outdoor labor such as construction work and food delivery includes mandatory breaks. Employers are also advised — but not mandated — to adjust shifts to keep workers out of the midday sun. Greece requires heat-safety inspections during hotter months but the country's largest labor union, the GSEE, is calling for year-round monitoring. European labor unions and the United Nations' International Labor Organization are also pushing for a more coordinated international approach to handling the impact of rising temperatures on workers. 'Heat stress is an invisible killer,' the ILO said in a report last year on how heat hurts workers. It called for countries to increase worker heat protections, saying Europe and Central Asia have experienced the largest spike in excessive worker heat exposure this century. In Athens, grill cook Thomas Siamandas shaves meat from a spit in the threshold of the famed Bairaktaris Restaurant. He is out of the sun, but the 38 C (100.4 F) temperature recorded on July 16 was even tougher to endure while standing in front of souvlaki burners. Grill cooks step into air-conditioned rooms when possible and always keep water within reach. Working with a fan pointed at his feet, the 32-year-old said staying cool means knowing when to take a break, before the heat overwhelms you. 'It's tough, but we take precautions: We sit down when we can, take frequent breaks and stay hydrated. We drink plenty of water — really a lot,' said Siamandas, who has worked at the restaurant for eight years. 'You have to find a way to adjust to the conditions.' The blazing sun in Rome Massimo De Filippis spends hours in the blazing sun each day sharing the history of vestal virgins, dueling gladiators and powerful emperors as tourists shuffle through Rome's Colosseum and Forum. 'Honestly, it is tough. I am not going to lie,' the 45-year-old De Filippis said as he wiped sweat from his face. 'Many times it is actually dangerous to go into the Roman Forum between noon and 3:30 p.m.' At midday on July 22, he led his group down the Forum's Via Sacra, the central road in ancient Rome. They paused at a fountain to rinse their faces and fill their bottles. Dehydrated tourists often pass out here in the summer heat, said Francesca Duimich, who represents 300 Roman tour guides in Italy's national federation, Federagit. 'The Forum is a pit; There is no shade, there is no wind,' Duimich said. 'Being there at 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. in the summer heat means you will feel unwell.' This year, guides have bombarded her with complaints about the heat. In recent weeks, Federagit requested that the state's Colosseum Archaeological Park, which oversees the Forum, open an hour earlier so tours can get a jump-start before the heat becomes punishing. The request has been to no avail, so far. The park's press office said that administrators are working to move the opening up by 30 minutes and will soon schedule visits after sunset. ___ Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain, Gatopoulos from Athens and Thomas from Rome.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Is Fashion Ready for Climate ‘Crunch Time'?
'We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,' United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned at the American Natural History Museum in New York City last month, citing a World Meteorological Organization that predicted even more record-breaking temperatures over the next five years. 'We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.' The traffic metaphor could not have been more apt. With extreme heat currently gripping vast swathes of the United States and Europe, subjecting tens of millions of people to dangerous temperatures far above what is usual for this time of year, even Germany's famed autobahn is buckling under the strain, requiring emergency repairs. Over in Greece, mandatory work breaks have been imposed in parts of the country where temperatures are expected to exceed 104 degrees Fahrenheit. On Monday, scientists said that the Fourth of July flash floods in Texas that killed at least 100 people—27 of them children and counselors from a summer camp—were caused by 'very exceptional meteorological conditions' that could not be explained by natural variability alone. More from Sourcing Journal Are Unionized Garment Factories Being Targeted for Closures? Long Excluded in Climate Conversations, Fashion's Suppliers Create Own Seat at Table Ecuador Apologizes to Abused Abacaleros, Plantation Remains Silent If humanity still has 'control of the wheel,' as Guterres said, it may not be for long. Despite having 'what we need to save ourselves,' he said, referring to technologies that can slash emissions and protections that can safeguard carbon-absorbing forests, wetlands and oceans, 'the battle to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s—under the watch of leaders today.' The global financial system must be part of the climate solution, too, he added. Right now, for every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only roughly five cents is available. Fashion, a trillion-dollar industry, could also be accused of distracted driving under these conditions. While major brands such as Adidas, H&M Group, Lululemon, Zara owner Inditex and even Shein show 'promising signs of improvement' in their climate strategies, even raising their ambitions, according to a sectorial deep dive by the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch in June, their credibility is being thwarted by limited transparency on implementation plans, a reliance on problematic substitutions and a failure to shift completely away from the fast fashion business model. 'You can't only set targets,' said Benja Faecks, expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch, which is based in Brussels. 'You also need to substantiate them with measures. For the fashion sector, one of the biggest things is that you need to electrify your supply chain. And while all the companies are talking about how renewable energy is needed, there's almost no talk about how other processes that are not yet electrified need to be electrified.' Among those so-called 'false solutions,' the report said, is replacing coal with biomass as a power source. Companies like H&M and Inditex say they are sourcing biomass with the lowest risk of adverse impact to help bridge efforts where barriers such as unreliable grid connections make transitioning to renewable energy difficult. Faecks said, however, that doing so doesn't substantially reduce emissions and, instead, risks locking in carbon-intensive technologies. Unbundled, stand-alone renewable energy certificates, or RECs, are another problem. Two decades of REC procurement, meant to help finance new renewable energy projects, have mostly failed to create additional capacity on the grid, creating a 'misleading narrative' about progress, she added. Faecks said that it's the same with overproduction. Despite increasing industry chatter about the need to curtail the constant churn, no company has set measurable targets to do so. Rather than changing tack, Faecks said, businesses are still leaning on overproduction as a default strategy, creating tens of millions of metric tons of textile waste every year as a direct consequence. There's a climate corollary, too: One 2020 McKinsey study estimated that reducing the quantity of pre-consumer unsold clothing by 10 percent through more efficient supply chains and more accurate forecasting tools could reduce industry-wide emissions by 9 percent by 2030. It's why the French legislature is embracing new rules that could regulate fast fashion's even speedier counterpart, emblematized by Shein. 'And it's not only for household brands like H&M and Inditex, but also for Gucci, Prada and the higher-value brands that are overstimulating customer demands,' Faecks said. 'So I think we need a rethinking of what fashion is, and how we can go from cradle to grave without exceeding planetary boundaries.' Other key transitions listed by the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Watch report—lower-impact fibers and low-emission logistics—have likewise seen middling progress, though not to the extent that they could be accurately referred to as 'transitions,' she said. A more recent McKinsey study found that nearly two-thirds of clothing and footwear purveyors are behind on their 2030 decarbonization goals, with many shunting sustainability down their list of priorities and scaling back their commitments by pushing back or rescinding their net-zero targets. Only 18 percent of fashion executives ranked sustainability as a top-three risk to growth in 2025 versus 29 percent in 2024, it noted. Global Fashion Agenda CEO Federica Marchionni alluded to this at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last month, where she said that the only certainty in an uncertain world is and will be climate change. But the cold calculus is that companies, ponying up more for, say, the Trump White House's increased tariffs, will see thinner profit margins with less wiggle room for long-term investments bearing less tangible returns. 'As we adapt, countries and communities must be supported to respond to current and future climate change impacts,' she said. 'As fashion is contributing to the climate crisis, too, it must not only mitigate its environmental impact but also support value chain adaptation to build long-term resilience.' It's not only brands that bear responsibility, Faecks said, but also standard setters such as the GHG Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative, which could require transition alignment targets to better shepherd companies. Regulatory interventions are similarly crucial because otherwise companies would only be guided by voluntary initiatives. One problem, she said, is that there's too much finger-pointing about who's to blame for the current predicament and too little seizing of the reins. This phenomenon could worsen as companies face more existential issues—immediate-term financial health, for one—amid proliferating economic and geopolitical challenges that make the material risks of global warming feel, well, less material. 'You could also say that it's the consumer's responsibility to demand fewer clothes,' she said. 'So I think instead of shifting the blame, it's important to take leadership. Brands do have a role to play in engaging their suppliers. There are whole policy papers on how supplier engagement should work and should be encouraged. But without real frameworks and regulations, this game of blaming will continue.' A just transition? If fashion's climate plans are riddled with half measures, there's at least one area with a massively missing element: its workers. A June report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which is headquartered in London and New York, found that while more than half of the 65 brands it examined have made commitments to reduce supply chain emissions by 2030, not one target involves engaging with or mitigating the impact on workers. Of the seven companies with the most ambitious climate goals, just one—Inditex—has a public climate transition plan that mentions workers. This despite the fact that climate breakdown will disproportionately impact garment-producing hubs in the global South. That no brand has laid out a stand-alone 'just transition' policy—defined by the United Nations as 'leaving no person or country behind'—came as a surprise to Natalie Swan, labor rights program manager at BHRRC. She had assumed, going in, that it would have been an overutilized term, considering how often it's bandied about. 'I don't think that it is acceptable for a fashion company, or any business for that matter, to have ambitious decarbonization targets and not link workers intrinsically to a just transition,' she said. 'There is shared prosperity around this: there are rights holders along supply chains who are making the clothes that brands are selling, who absolutely have skin in the game on what a transition looks like.' Not mentioning workers beyond a throwaway line about engaging with stakeholders is a 'wilful omission,' she said. Speaking to workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, it was clear to her that they understand the climate emergency and the implications thereof, including how the growing use of new technologies or machinery could dramatically alter their employment landscape without reskilling or upskilling support. 'Their expertise was absolutely palpable on what the impact of heat was in factories, what they needed to feel safe at work and at home, and what they saw as the vision for a genuinely 'green' factory, rather than just an LEED-certified one,' Swan said. Existing heat standards for workplaces are vague, pithy, non-existent or subject to lax oversight regimes that render any modicum of guidance just a hair's breadth above meaningless. Workers are also the ones bearing the brunt of extreme heat and flooding that can create operational disruptions and drive respiratory illnesses, cardiac issues and infectious diseases. Between March and April, for instance, members of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union reported temperatures between 95 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit in garment factories across the South Indian state, or far above what a human body can reasonably tolerate under industrial conditions. If brands propel the transition with the current status quo of supply chain inequality 'baked in,' they will only perpetuate the 'unjust and self-defeating' power differential that undergirds current production systems by ignoring the people on the frontlines, she added. 'There is an opportunity—a business opportunity—to have a shared agenda and vision for what the future of fashion means,' Swan said. 'It's an absolute requirement because these rights holders will be at increased risk if international brands don't engage with workers and their representatives. They're not outside their business models. They're within and critical to their business models.' Even 'stakeholder engagement' can mean very different things to different people. Swan broke it down: 'Does it mean utilizing worker voice technology? Does it mean having a conversation with a few individual workers along your supply chain? Does it mean having a conversation with participation committees that do not make up stakeholder engagement, particularly when you do have the ability to have unionized workforce forces along your supply chains?' Writing in an article that BHRRC published last month, labor campaigners Nandita Shivakumar and Apekshita Varshney recounted how one factory employee told them that brands are writing their sustainability policies in air-conditioned rooms at 68 degrees Fahrenheit for people working in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat. Workers aren't asking for luxuries, they said, just the 'bare minimum to survive,' such as cold drinking water, a functioning fan for every five to 10 people and clean bathrooms to rinse off their sweat. 'The cost of meeting these needs is negligible,' they wrote. 'The question is not about affordability: it's about willingness.' Brands, investors and multi-stakeholder initiatives, they said, must recognize heat stress as a human rights issue and incorporate it into human rights due diligence, occupational safety and climate adaptation plans. Equally important, they must share the financial burden of adaptation by funding infrastructure improvements, particularly for low-margin suppliers. Back in New York City, Guterres described the present as the 'moment of truth' for climate action. Because every fraction of a degree of global heating counts, amounting to the 'difference between minimizing climate chaos or crossing dangerous tipping points,' now is the time to mobilize, act and deliver, he said. 'Our planet is trying to tell us something, but we don't seem to be listening,' Guterres said. 'It's climate crunch time. The need for action is unprecedented but so is the opportunity—not just to deliver on climate, but on economic prosperity and sustainable development.' Solve the daily Crossword
