“The heat destroys quietly, but there is no escape from the heat,” said Eleni Myrivili, Athens Heat Director. “These are temperatures for which our body is not made.”
Myrivili, an assistant professor at the University of the Aegean, who was appointed head of heat in Athens in 2021, said summer temperatures in the city had reached 45 degrees, fires had burned in the area and people had died from the prolonged heat.
Her job is to find ways to redesign Athens that will promote greener spaces, buildings and landscape design that conducts heat instead of absorbing it and proposing coping strategies for residents.
“Raising the air conditioner is not going to stop it,” she said of the existential threat her community faces.
Damaged structures and vehicles are seen in Lytton, BC, on Friday, July 9, 2021, following a fire that destroyed most of the village on June 30. (Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press)
The TED 2022 conference is the first time the event returns in person to the Vancouver Convention Center since 2019 due to the global pandemic.
It includes more than 100 speakers giving short talks on future ideas, technologies, art and design.
I’m excited to be on stage at pic.twitter.com/0Xvs6v2vsX
– @ BillGates
This year’s conference, entitled “A New Era”, seeks to outline the changes needed to address the current pandemic, climate change and violent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine.
Myrivili participated in a session called “Renaissance”, which explores ways to accelerate and act on climate change.
Two recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have described the dire consequences of not taking action to keep global warming below 2 degrees this century.
The TED renaissance session mentioned Lytton several times in BC, a village about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver, which was completely destroyed by fire after recording the hottest temperature in Canada at 49.6 C in 2021.
Nearly 600 people died due to extreme temperatures in British Columbia that summer, mostly due to a heat cloud that created temperatures around 40C from late June to early July in normally mild cities like Vancouver.
“It still shocks me to the bone”
“I’m still shocked to the bone, the fact that you had these temperatures over here,” Myrivili said after her presentation. He said the temperatures recorded as part of the heatwave in Greece weeks later were actually lower than those recorded in parts of British Columbia. “We watched you with bated breath when that happened last year,” he said. “But it hit us and it was shocking.” He said he hoped that thermal events such as those in BC. and in its country, it will be the catalyst required for substantial change. A pilot project is developing a way to categorize heat waves in a similar way to hurricanes, so that they are better aware of the danger of impending heat and how residents can prepare to deal with it.
“Build resilience”
Myrivilis described various initiatives used in cities around the world, such as a type of friend system used in New York to allow neighbors to check-in during heatwaves and an application in Athens that provides Real-time heat risk assessment.
In particular, he advocated a paradigm shift in how cities are currently designed and inhabited by heat-absorbing concrete and steel roads and buildings.
He described that old technologies in Greece are needed now, such as the calcium of buildings each year to reflect light, the placement of windows that enhance airflow and the aqueducts that bring water to cool areas, and the support for green spaces .
“We really, really need to build resilience.”
Al Gore speaks at a TED 2022 session: A New Era in Vancouver, BC (Gilberto Tadday / TED)
Also Wednesday at TED, former U.S. Vice President and climate activist Al Gore kicked off the renaissance session with a passionate speech about the desperate need of leaders in government and financial institutions to stop investing in fossil fuels and turning to fossil fuels. their focus on developing a myriad of technological advances, such as solar and wind energy, to achieve climate targets.
“We have the capacity to stop this progressive destruction of humanity,” he said before apologizing to the crowd for taking it, “everyone was warm and working for it.
“This is real.”
Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of Our Changing Planet, a CBC News initiative to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.
