HONG KONG:
William Yu is giving a tour of a Hong Kong apartment where each of the three
bedrooms has been divided into a separate flat - part of a lab he has set up to
show how many families live in small, crowded and hot spaces with no air
conditioning or fresh air. "Even if there is a window, there is no
ventilation and some flats are very scary," said Yu, of the homes on Hong
Kong's Chun Tin street. Outside the window, black smoke and pounding noises
rise from the Hop Lee metal and scrap paper shop on the dead-end street of
dilapidated tenement buildings in the Hung Hom district.

The World Green
Organization Yu founded has set up the apartments to show how some vulnerable
families live in one of the most expensive and densely-packed cities on earth -
and how they might cope with global warming. Average summer temperatures in
this city of 7.4 million people have risen swiftly over the past century,
according to a study by researchers including Emily Chan, who directs the
Centre for Global Health at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Temperatures
inside these illegally-divided flats are 6 to 7 degrees Celsuis hotter than
outside, and research shows heat in some of them rising from a former peak of
36C to closer to 40C in the height of summer, according to Yu. "In the
past we used to say, 'Don't stay outdoors for a long time exposed to intensive
sunlight, otherwise you will get heatstroke,'" said Yu. "Now we have
found the opposite in the subdivided flats: Don't stay indoors for a long time
as that's bad for your health."

Yu instead tells
families to go to a shopping mall with strong air-conditioning and not to keep
windows open because of the air pollution outside. This is but one example of
how warming is hitting Hong Kong's vulnerable hardest in this steamy city that
last week hosted an international forum on heat risks from climate change.
Global experts on health, weather and climate flocked to the former British
colony to try to find ways to manage what Joy Shumake-Guillemot, who leads the
joint office of the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Meteorological
Organization (WMO) in Switzerland, called "the silent emergency that heat
poses to health".

As part of the
effort, they launched the Global Heat Health Information Network (GHHIN), made
up of experts from more than 30 countries, all keen to work out how to deal
with growing heat extremes as the world continues to break heatwave records.
While typhoons and fires grab headlines, heatwaves kill more people than any
other weather-related disaster, though the deaths are rarely attributed to
heat, the GHHIN said. With more people moving to cities globally, the risks are
rising as well, it said. "Heat affects everyone," said
Shumake-Guillemot. "From healthy athletes and outdoor workers, to the
elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions ... many people simply
don't realize how serious dehydration and heat stress can be."

Steamy city

The subtropical
city of Hong Kong has a unique set of heat challenges and opportunities that
make it a useful case study. Its dense urban living, combined with a humid
climate, means growing heat threats, with average high temperatures in the
summer hitting 31 or 32 degrees Celsuis. The concrete, skyscrapers and lack of
greenery in inner city areas lead to what is coined the "urban heat
island" effect, which means the city gets - and stays - hotter than
surrounding more rural areas. That particularly affects the city's most vulnerable
living in tiny, subdivided apartments, Yu said. Chan said hospital records
showed that an increase in high temperature from 29C to 30C was linked with a 4
percent jump in deaths in urban areas with particular heat vulnerability,

The rate of
admissions to hospitals also rose 4.5 percent for every jump of 1C above 29C, a
study by her team showed. There is "not a single health outcome that is
not affected" by soaring heat, Chan said. Faced with growing heat threats,
policy makers, urban planners, academics and non-governmental organizations are
working together to tackle the problem, Chan said. The Hong Kong Observatory,
for instance, has created a heat index that measures temperature, humidity,
wind speed and other measures and warns the public when key thresholds are
passed.

It is also
working with a senior citizens' organization to see how weather data could help
growing numbers of elderly people - who are particularly at risk - cope with
temperature extremes. The observatory also works with urban planners to help
design effective layouts for the city and plan how buildings fit, taking into
account micro-climates in different areas. It has plans to install sensors at
street level to see how hot and steamy life there gets, as well as use
crowdsourcing to create real-time weather forecasts on heat impacts and risks
to people.

Planning ahead

All of this makes
Hong Kong a heat pioneer in Asia, Chan said - and heat experts hope to learn
from its experiences and those of other cities as the world becomes
increasingly urbanized. "We need to take steps to educate the public on
healthy behaviours they should take up, and train medical professionals to be
more attentive to heat stress symptoms in patients," said
Shumake-Guillemot. Helping cities plan ahead to accommodate extreme
temperatures and become more liveable in the face of them, as well as better
coordinating emergency preparedness to manage heatwaves, will be key, she said.
"The likelihood of falling sick from heat has increased for everyone,"
Shmake-Guillemot said. Heat experts "are taking this new reality
seriously, and are working to find solutions to keep people healthy in a
warming world." - Reuters