They’re adopting rules for disconnecting electricity, mandating when to switch on communal air conditioning and improving communication with at-risk people living alone.
Situated in the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix and its suburbs are ground zero for heat-associated deaths in the U.S. Such fatalities are so common that Arizona’s largest county keeps a during the six-month hot season from May through October. Temperatures this year were already hitting the high 90s the first week of April.“Phoenix really is the model for what we’ll be seeing in other places,” said researcher Jennifer Ailshire, a native of the desert city now at the University of Southern California’s
where she studies how environmental factors affect health and aging. “The world is changing rapidly and I fear we are not acting fast enough to teach people how harmful rising temperatures can be.” estimated more than a third of U.S. heat deaths each year can be attributed to human-caused global warming. It found more than 1,100 deaths a year from climate change-caused heat in some 200 U.S.