It's not the heat, it's the clearing

Climate change, a product of human action, intensifies extreme weather events, including heat waves, which are defined as periods in which minimum and maximum temperatures exceed, for at least three consecutive days, certain values that depend on the location. .

Extreme heat waves are already about five times more likely to occur due to rising temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions

Sorry, it makes us uncomfortable, it dehydrates us. And, far from being innocuous, the heat also kills us. In 2023, it will be twenty years since the worst climate catastrophe in recent history: the heat wave that, in 2003, particularly affected Spain, France and Italy, and left more than 80,000 dead in 12 countries. If we go locally, December will mark the tenth anniversary of one of the worst heat waves in Argentina, which spread from Buenos Aires to Mendoza: in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires alone, it left a balance of 544 deaths. A total of deaths that is greater than all deaths from floods in the entire country, between 1985 and 2015.

But make no mistake: excess heat is not a thing of the past. The copious accumulation of extreme events only confirms heat waves as a symptom of global warming that has increasingly noticeable consequences in an increasingly pressing present. Testimony of this is that, just in the first ten days of 2023, more than thirty cities in Argentina were affected by a heat wave. Cities in Patagonia, in the center and north of our country, registered atypically high temperatures for more than three consecutive days, which exceeded local minimum and maximum temperature thresholds established by the National Meteorological Service.

People who live in popular neighborhoods have a double risk: in addition to the high social vulnerability that their inhabitants present in the face of disasters, we must add the fact that these areas tend to be particularly hot. In part, this is due to the low provision of green spaces and trees in general, which mitigate the urban heat island effect, as well as provide shade and shelter on very hot days. Added to this is the fact that housing quality deficits are concentrated in poor neighborhoods (in terms of materials, overcrowding, and access to basic services such as running water, electricity, or sewage), among other factors that, in addition to conspiring against access fair and equitable to the habitat- contribute to the concentration of heat in these areas.

Sea level rise poses an existential threat to many communities and may trigger a mass exodus of biblical proportions.

Countries like Bangladesh, China, India and the Netherlands are at risk. Megacities on all continents face serious impacts including Cairo, Lagos, Maputo, Bangkok, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mumbai, Shanghai, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, New York, Buenos Aires and Santiago, warned the United Nations Secretary General United, Antonio Guterres.

Deforestation implies a worsening of the conditions to face climate change. And it is that trees absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, preventing them from being released into the atmosphere. In Argentina, changes in land use and livestock farming generate more than half of the greenhouse gases that the country emits into the atmosphere.

Forest ecosystems play an important role in conserving the world’s biodiversity, including regulating climate, providing basic materials for livelihoods, and reducing the impacts of natural hazards.

Almost half of the world’s forests have been lost in the last 8,000 years as a consequence, mainly, of human activities, and this reduction worsened in the last six decades, during which the forest area has decreased by 81.7 million hectares.

Unfortunately, global leaders are not on track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally 1.5°C. Forecasts estimate that the planet is heading for a warming of 3°C over the course of this century, which would have significant negative consequences for human health.

Senior Technician in Environmental Management and Senior Technician in Social Communication (Journalist)