With the official start of summer drawing closer, so does concern around climate change and its disproportionate impact on low-income communities and communities of color.
According to nonprofit Trust for America's Health, more people died of extreme heat in 2022 than any other weather event combined.
Heat is also one of the major causes of death in the workplace, both for outdoor and agricultural workers as well as people who work in manufacturing.
Alonzo Plough, chief science officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said local and state governments need to provide better remedies and conditions to mitigate dangerous summer temperatures.
"That can be turning parking lots into open spaces and parks," he said. "Planting of trees, that makes a big difference. Cities should be thinking about, for low-income families, energy supports that allow them to be able to run air conditioning in their fragile budgets. And then an attention particularly to low-income housing, air conditioning just has to become a requirement and not something optional."
The threat of rising temperatures on public health is compounded in under resourced communities, which are most vulnerable to increased health risks such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion.
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