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This summer, much of the media’s attention has focused on record temperatures across Europe and the United States. Television coverage has been filled with familiar images: heat maps shaded deep red, schools closing, rail lines slowing, wildfires spreading and emergency rooms treating growing numbers of people with heat-related illnesses.
Public officials have responded with equally familiar advice: stay indoors, drink plenty of water and, if possible, turn on the air conditioning.
Across the world, summer heat could now be deadly unless you can buy your way out. In the United States and Europe, millions of households already struggle to pay their electric bills, and rising temperatures mean they will need to use even more electricity simply to stay safe.
Meanwhile, in much of the global south, we could see human catastrophes as dangerous heat collides with unreliable electricity, overcrowded housing, limited access to air conditioning, weak public health systems and widespread poverty.
In both cases, inequality, within countries and among them, could decide the fate of millions. We know the solutions: help lower-income families afford cooling, invest in resilient infrastructure, and lean into less-costly, more stable clean technologies. The question is whether we have the will.
Extreme heat is the most deadly form of weather. It kills about 2,000 people a year in the US, and Europe’s heat dome killed more than 1,300 people in less than two weeks this June. Low-income energy assistance to help families pay their home energy bills is a core solution in the US. That is because most households have electricity and cooling systems.
In much of the global south, the challenge is fundamentally different. During a recent visit to India, I came away with the impression that government officials understood exactly what needed to be done.
They talked about expanding electricity systems, improving housing, increasing access to efficient cooling, strengthening public health planning and protecting vulnerable populations. Their challenge was not a lack of ideas. It was a lack of resources.
The Lancet estimated that hundreds of thousands of people already die from heat each year, and the burden is expected to grow most rapidly in south Asia and Africa. The United Nations has warned that extreme heat is widening inequality, slowing economic development and taking a growing human toll. The people facing the greatest risks are often those who have contributed least to global greenhouse gas emissions.
The solution is not simply for western countries to ship millions of air conditioners to developing countries. In many of these places, the electric grid could not support them even if every family could afford one.
The west should help countries in the global south invest in cheaper, more stable forms of clean and secure energy to build the infrastructure needed to live safely in a warmer climate. Low-income countries cannot build this infrastructure on their own.
Development banks, international climate funds, private investors and wealthier nations will all need to become partners in financing the next generation of climate adaptation. This should not be viewed as traditional foreign aid. It is an investment in global health, economic stability and human resilience.
None of this suggests that wealthy countries have solved their own cooling challenges. They have not. Millions of American and European households struggle every summer with rising electricity bills, and too many families still have to choose between paying the electric bill and keeping their home safe during periods of extreme heat.
Funding for the primary US program that helps families pay their home energy bills is only sufficient to help about one out of six eligible families. But we have the economic capacity to address that shortfall. Whether we do so is largely a question of political priorities.
Helping lower-income countries build reliable electricity systems is not simply a humanitarian obligation. It is also a strategic investment. If the United States and Europe fail to become meaningful partners in financing climate adaptation, other countries will fill that vacuum, expanding both their economic influence and their geopolitical ties across much of the developing world.
Climate policy has long been measured by how much carbon the world can avoid emitting. That will always matter. But over the coming decades, it may also be judged by whether the world’s wealthiest countries were willing to help billions of people in the global south adapt to a hotter planet.
In the United States and Europe, access to affordable cooling is increasingly a question of political priorities. In much of the global south, it is a question of resources and, increasingly, survival.
The next phase of the climate debate has to be about more than reducing emissions. It also has to be about helping people survive the climate we have already created by investing in reliable electricity, affordable cooling and heat resilience in the countries that can least afford them.
Otherwise, the next great climate divide will not be between the countries that emitted the most carbon and those that emitted the least. It will be between those that had the resources to adapt and those that did not.
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Mark Wolfe is executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, co-director of the Center on Energy Poverty and Climate, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University
