Dive Brief:
-
The Federation of American Scientists on Tuesday released its State and Local Heat Policy Agenda outlining what’s needed to protect residents and communities from extreme heat, with a searchable database of more than 400 evidence-based policy solutions and case studies from all 50 states.
-
Endorsed by nearly 150 organizations and government officials representing more than 40 states, the agenda complements FAS’s federally oriented 2025 Heat Policy Agenda, “recognizing the growing importance of state and local leadership on climate-related extreme weather events such as extreme heat,” according to an FAS news release.
-
FAS built a coalition of government officials, policymakers, advocacy and community-based organizations and other contributors to promote the 2025 Heat Policy Agenda, Grace Wickerson, FAS senior manager of climate and health, told Smart Cities Dive. But “so much change has happened at the federal level,” she said. “Much of what we put in this document still aspirationally and principally needs to be done, but the capacity to do it has been severely diminished.”
Dive Insight:
Nearly 150 daily high-temperature records fell across the U.S. between June 30 and July 5, and another heat dome is developing this week.
“As America celebrated its 250th anniversary this past weekend, over 185 million Americans — over half the population — were under an extreme heat alert,” FAS Associate Director of Climate and Environment Hannah Safford said in a statement. “The State and Local Heat Policy Agenda helps communities adapt to this new normal, by providing easy access to the solutions that science shows can effectively curb the worst impacts of dangerously hot temperatures.”
Wickerson spoke with state and local government officials in all 50 states during her research for the agenda. “There’s a lot of rising concern about how hot this summer is going to be and how it’s going to compound with other non-weather-related risks,” she said.
“Extreme heat has become a national economic crisis: lowering productivity, shrinking business revenue, destroying crops, and pushing power grids to the brink,” according to the 2026 agenda. Extreme heat impacts cost the U.S. an estimated $162 billion — equivalent to nearly 1% of U.S. GDP — in 2024, and “local governments and their partners are footing the bill for increased demand for social services, public safety, and health care,” the agenda states.
The agenda outlines 15 outcomes state and local governments could pursue to ensure safe homes, workplaces, schools, child care and communities. These include ensuring people can afford cooling, treating cool classrooms as a child’s right, giving workers heat breaks, engineering the electric grid to carry peak demand and scaling cooling strategies like tree canopies and cool roofs across entire communities.
“One of the greatest concerns we’ve heard about is with the electric grid,” especially as data centers “slowly creep up on our peak loads,” Wickerson said. “While it is a state responsibility to regulate, local governments are going to bear the cost. So, they need to be thinking about how they’re working on their own local energy resilience solutions so they have what they need to protect their populations.”
The 2026 FAS agenda helps local officials look at heat not only as an emergency, but as a chronic seasonal risk, Wickerson said. It helps them understand “the costs and what we are actually spending our money and resources on to create a learning and evaluation system that allows us to operate successfully through this time of austerity.”
In many cities, several different agencies address heat-related actions, creating a silo effect, Wickerson said. The agenda offers case studies such as Phoenix, which has instituted a formal incident command system that includes weekly check-ins bringing all agencies to the table to address extreme summer heat, she said.
While it’s not feasible for every city to have a chief heat officer, it’s important to “have someone who’s working on heat with that authority, budget and coordinating capacity, because otherwise, it doesn’t have a home and it’s not the focus,” Wickerson said.
Correction: This article was edited to correct the spelling of Grace Wickerson's name.
