Could categorising heatwaves help businesses?
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Oh, the bells, the bells. Actually, in Victor Hugo's book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the main character, Quasimodo the bell ringer, never says those words. And the bells you can hear behind me aren't of Notre Dame, but from one of the biggest cathedrals in the world, the Cathedral of Seville. Oh, the bells, the bells.

Hello, my name is Ashish Sharma and I'm here in this charming Spanish city for this edition of Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

Seville piloted a project which ended last year and was the first of its kind to track and aim severe heat waves to help the local population become more aware and help the local economy prepare better for such weather. In this program, I'll look at how the pilot was developed in Seville, but also worldwide. All that coming up in Business Daily.

We'll hear more from Jorge Gastelmundi of the Atlantic Council that pioneered the algorithm.

In the summer, this city is one of the hottest in Spain and this has an impact on many local businesses, especially in tourism. During summertime, we are very worried that everyone is good during the whole tour, so we avoid going out when it's too hot.

so they don't have any health issues during the tour. The pilot scheme, the first of its kind, was called Prometeo. By the time it ended last year, several severe heat waves had been identified and named in Seville. The algorithm was established by the Atlantic Council and worked upon in the city by the University of Seville in cooperation with the local government.

Heatwaves don't have names unlike storms or hurricanes, which are also categorised. But for all natural weather phenomena, they can have the greatest impact on people's lives, on overall public health and the local economy.

Jorge Gastelamundi is a senior director of the Atlantic Council's Climate Resilience Centre, which looks at solutions to protect communities and local economies from extreme heat conditions. You know, in Seville, people usually assume, you know, I'm used to hot, this is nothing new.

But the fact that they were named alerted them that this was something probably different to what they were used to. We also found that some significant socioeconomic markers, such as, you know, gender, like women were more attuned to the fact that they needed to take action similar to more wealthy neighborhoods in the city, as well as the elderly.

That actually could help policymakers to consider how they can develop both messaging policies, incentives to mobilize actors who are most likely to take notice of what they were doing and who are less likely. After the pilot finished, was there any kind of pickup or continuation of this process in Seville? In the case of Seville, there was enough impetus to take on a second year. And so the first year, they named one heat wave.

The second year was a more intense year in terms of extreme heat in the city. So they ended up naming four heat waves during that season.

Were there any aspects of the project which you looked at afterwards, which you realise really could serve companies or local economies in some way? So we realised that this same algorithm that connects all these different factors could be used for the insurance sector because they need triggers. They need to understand when they're insuring a particular good or service.

that they will have the right data to understand when they need to pay or when they don't need to pay. Last year, we piloted an insurance product with Self-Employed Women Association in India for 21,000 women.

in which the good or service that was being protected was lost, potential lost income. So when you hit a heat wave and you are an informal worker, you have an impossible choice of whether going out and impacting your health by getting an income or staying at home and losing that income. What the algorithm did is to be used as a parametric that could be served as a trigger for the insurance sector.

Were there any negative reactions or resistance to this pilot scheme? Interesting that you ask because in Seville, one of the key points for initial caution and taking on this approach of categorizing and naming heat waves was a tourism sector. They wanted to avoid being seen as an extreme, a dangerous city for tourists during the summer.

Initially, they felt that by categorizing or particularly by naming heat waves, they would push away tourists coming into the city. And it's a huge, huge industry for them. So there was cautious. But then with the first administration, with whom we work very closely, they said, you know, it's actually better for us to understand how dangerous events are in advance on the one hand.

Adri, send me the list. Please, otherwise I can't do the check-in. Please.

Daniel gathers his group of 12 international tourists. They're about to go on a three-hour bicycle tour of the city. The price per person is $36. We've been on two tours and the guides even say that the place shuts down in July and August. They were telling us that, saying there's nothing open, there's no point coming, it's 45 degrees.

You know, if I was here in that heat, I'd do something very early in the morning and do what the Spanish do and late in the evening. Siesta time in the afternoon and then out again in the evening. Yeah, indeed. It's going to have a go at me if you don't get on those bikes. Nice to talk to you. Very nice to meet you. Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel. I'm going to be the guide, OK? So we have Milou, two people coming from...

Netherlands, professional riders. The company he works for, C by Bike, was voted as one of the 20 best bike tour companies in the world by the travel platform TripAdvisor. But C by Bike only has two seasons in a calendar year to maximise their income. And we have Laura. Laura, two people, two. OK, you're coming from...

My name is Adriana Llanos and I'm the manager of C by Bike. So during wintertime and summertime, we focus on doing office work because we don't have many bookings. And during high season, as spring and fall, we are usually only focused on tours because we have lots and lots of customers. So during summertime, what we do is changing our tours. We adapt to what the customer needs in summer. So instead of starting the tour at 2.30pm,

We start at 9 a.m. so that they have the full day in the city, starting with the bike tour. But normally we don't have that tour. Do you worry more about the customers that you have in the summer because of the heat in terms of health risks? Because I suppose you then become liable. Yes, we do. During summertime, we are very worried that everyone is...

during the whole tour. For example, when someone from Miami or Arizona wants to book a private tour in July at 3 p.m., we tell them that it's not a good idea because it's too hot. And it's dangerous, for real. If it's too hot...

It's not only dangerous for them, but also for us. They've been doing the pilot project of Prometeo, which is naming of heat waves. I would imagine that would have been very important and interesting for you to be across that. How useful is some sort of information like that when you know in advance that you have such a severe heat wave that it's actually got a name to it?

For us, it would be very useful to name the heat waves. That would mean that we are talking more about the heat waves. That way we could organize easier the changes we have to do. Like if I know that I'm going to have a heat wave next week, I can start telling the customers now so that we can adapt and never cancel. We always stay in the shade. I know every single shade in town. Really? Yes. Every single shade in town. And drink a lot of water.

That's the key to it is to drink cold water all the time. You're listening to Business Daily with me, Ashish Sharma.

In this edition, we're looking at a pilot project which took place in the Spanish city of Seville called Prometeo, aimed at naming heat waves in order to raise public awareness and better prepare local economies of extreme heat conditions. For Jorge Gastalmundi, the senior director of the Atlantic Council's Climate Resilience Centre, the algorithm established in Seville had lots of possibilities to be adapted in other parts of the world. While we were working with Seville,

We kept delving into our efforts to keep making the algorithm more sophisticated, and we picked the attention of National Observatory of Athens in Greece. Even though they didn't launch into working on naming per se, they worked on a health-based categorization system and piloted it in Athens. The Hellenic Red Cross picked up this categorization system and used it as part of their early action protocols.

which incorporates categorization as a way of a trigger for a funding mechanism that they have for three cities in Greece, and then use that as a trigger for a financial mechanism to pay people in these three cities, Athens, Thessaloniki, and Patra, assign a budget of around $300,000 for a yearly basis

That program of categorization was pioneered by Eleni Mirivili. Today, Eleni is the Global Chief Heat Officer for United Nations Habitats.

but was Athens deputy mayor when she started to look at warning systems for heat waves. I always kind of talked about the fact that, for example, when we have a Hurricane 4 or a Hurricane 5, we never think of warning.

ordering pizza. But when we have like extreme heat events, we kind of stay inside, turn on the air conditioning and we kind of order pizza. We're talking about an extreme weather event and that we cannot have people delivering pizzas or doing tons of other things because it's putting them under extreme danger. Basically, policymakers and decision makers did not realize that extreme heat comes with very high levels of mortality and morbidity.

And categorizing heat waves is a way of raising awareness. I was mostly doing the categorization of heat waves so that people that are the decision makers, the policy makers, the journalists, et cetera, could be able to put together actions that were linked with different levels of risk. We actually had a triangle

that had yellow at the bottom, orange in the middle and red at the top and used the words low, middle and high risk. And with each tier, it explained a little bit what it meant. We can see the financial devastation that storms can have on a local economy through the damage. But is there any research that shows the financial or economic impact of heat waves? Yes. So the Atlantic Council's climate report

a resilient center did a series of studies that tried to quantify the effects, the impact, the economic impact of heat waves. And it started in 2021 with a study that

figured out that the losses from just productivity, which means that people don't feel well or the conditions under which they work are not kind of proper for them to work under, the productivity losses in the US are calculated up to 100 billion yearly currently.

And they are projected by 2050 to go up to half a trillion dollars. This is like really, really important. It's one of the very first studies that came out that showed these types of numbers. In 2022, another study that looked at 12 different cities around the world and again calculated in which sectors

are the losses that we're going to have from productivity in Dhaka as opposed to Athens, as opposed to cities in the United States. And finally, the third report that we commissioned was looking at gender and how much more affected women are in India, in Nigeria and the United States.

Well, I've just come to a meeting place that I've arranged and I'm glad to say that I have José Maria from the University of Seville who's joined me. José, thank you very much for meeting me and taking time to talk to the BBC. My pleasure.

The naming was a specific issue in Seville. The idea from the partners in the United States was to test if the... Let's go that side because it will be more sunny, I think. And that will be important here today. They wanted to measure how the naming of a system will impact into the population.

So they kind of implemented this methodology in Athens and Seville. In Seville there was a naming system in order to see which is the impact of naming a heatwave in the population. In Seville people are used...

to heat waves. This is not something that's new. So what makes the difference in a project like this? What does it give you as scientists and researchers and what does it give the general population that you're looking after? So people is used to hot weather, people is used to high temperature. When heat waves hit,

It hits also in Seville. We are not immune to the effects of a heat wave. In the end, when it came to this project, when you need to raise the alarm, to raise the name, for instance, or something like that,

We were looking at forecasts and we were deciding, well, is it worth to raise the alarm or it doesn't worth to raise the alarm? And this was a local project. This was a project for the city of Seville. It was not even a project for the province of Seville. And it was not a project for Spain. I mean, we were not predicting heat waves in Spain as a whole or in the province of Seville. We're all going to suffer climate change, but we...

think about it and we try to change things ourselves so that the impact it has on us isn't as big as it could be.

Scientists are saying that we are already in uncharted territories as far as extreme weather events and we definitely have to prepare for extreme heat. There's no question about it. This means especially for cities because cities are heating up twice as fast as the global average and we have to make sure that the cities and the millions, billions of people that sit

that live in those cities are protected. Human people is resilient. I mean, if the temperature goes up and heat waves are becoming more frequent, these people just will take the preemptive action that will be needed to make them comfortable in these uncomfortable circumstances.

Heat waves are silent killers. There is no drama when they appear, but they catch out the vulnerable and quietly devastate the economy through their impact on health. Finding ways to combat them, be it by naming them or categorising them, could be one answer to deal with the future in which our urban centres become even hotter.

You've been listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service presented by me, Ashish Sharma. You can listen to more episodes. Just search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.