What happens to people who are homeless in a heatwave?
In the UK, the dual impacts of slow onset climate change and infrastructure changes due to coronavirus are causing a deadly situation. In this article drawn from activity on the ground and policy research we assess what impact climate change is having on people who live on the street and in inadequate accommodation.
Currently, there is a situation in the UK with a dire gap in provision which is leading to a documented increase in deaths in the summer months. Every time there is a heatwave there is a flurry of activity by grassroots groups and grave concern from the public, but we have yet to see climate change and it’s impact on the community taken seriously by the authorities. (5 minute read)
One of our friends on the street once expressed irritation about the fuss around extreme weather. “We can look after ourselves you know, we are not babies.” He is absolutely right. The creative survival skills needed to navigate a life homeless and especially street homelessness are second to none. With that said, the people who are living at the sharp end of poverty, both in the UK and globally, are at most immediate risk from the impacts of climate change, and we need policies and practice to catch up as a matter of extreme urgency.
In London, where Museum of Homelessness is based, the weather forecast tells us that we have two days of 31 degrees ahead and the rest of the week will hover around 28 degrees. This type of temperature can make the city streets feel unrelenting. There’s not much opportunity for respite from the heat, and our infrastructure is not built for it. You’ll regularly encounter fridges and freezers broken down in shops, and air conditioning doesn’t exist. Well, air conditioning does exist, but not for our community. For people who are attempting to survive the streets or stuck in cramped one-room accommodation carved out of Edwardian housing stock, air conditioning doesn’t exist.
Our infrastructure is not ready for climate change, and it’s the poorest people who are already suffering. Each time there is a heatwave, volunteers from our fellow Homeless Taskforce organisations like The Simon Community and Streets Kitchen will add extra measures to their regular outreaches. Others, like ourselves and smaller groups of informal volunteers, will do short burst activity with water and sunscreen to try to help mitigate the effects of the heat. The Simon Community said yesterday:
“We’ve got cold water, ice poles and sun cream going out, but we need SWEP. This weather is SEVERE”.
Each time there is a heatwave, we and partners call for action from local authorities, and often we ask for SWEP (Severe Weather Emergency Protocol). We are not alone. Last week, the London Network of Nurses and Midwives Homelessness group issued a bulletin that requested the homelessness sector stand by.
“If the Met Office upgrades the Heat Health Alert to Level 3 or higher for your location, we encourage councils to trigger their local arrangements for ensuring the health and wellbeing of people sleeping rough in your area during a heatwave.”
The Met Office upgraded the Heat Health Alert to Level 3 on Friday 8th July and yet on outreaches, no sign of a heat response from councils and services was available. On Saturday 9th July Streets Kitchen gave 80 people breakfast in a small area of Camden. We are not sabre-rattling for the sake of it, this is deadly serious. Our findings from the Dying Homeless Project show that more people die in the summer than in winter. This is not just restricted to the streets. It affects people in sweltering emergency and temporary accommodation too, where chronic conditions such as COPD, which many of our population live with, can be exacerbated by the conditions in a heatwave.
One of our community reports that cooking in his one room emergency accommodation is “useless” and “does wonders for end stage COPD” because the extraction fan has been wrongly fitted with a circulation fan. This is a typical situation for emergency accommodation, cramped, badly maintained and a serious risk to health. The Homeless Link briefing on heatwaves published June 2022 reinforces that SWEP (Severe Weather Emergency Protocol) should apply to heatwaves as well as cold snaps to reduce the risk of death.
“Deaths may be from underlying illnesses made worse by heat – primarily lung and heart diseases – or from heat-specific conditions, such as heat exhaustion and heatstroke. Mental ill health may also worsen during hot weather.”
The same briefing notes that, due to ongoing Coronavirus restrictions,
“When outside, access to drinking water and air-conditioned public buildings has been restricted, building-based services cannot welcome as many people indoors during the heat of the day.”
Key infrastructure, such as day centre spaces where people can cool off, rehydrate and eat something decent, feels to us like a real gap in services. And other options to get indoors are reducing. Just this week, journalist James Grieg uncovered that half of all public toilets in the capital have closed in the last 10 years. Before the pandemic, CIPFA’s annual statistics release showed that a 1/5 of all public libraries in the UK (excluding NI), had closed in the last decade.
Grassroots community-led groups in the Homeless Taskfoce such as the Outside Project, have found ways to safely accommodate the community, running a communal shelter and day centre services throughout the pandemic, with zero outbreaks.
So with all of this in mind we ask, two years on from the onset of the pandemic, why have we not adapted broader services, so people are not at risk of death from the heatwave? We have restricted access to life-saving shade indoors but we are not seeing many options for people to gather safely, such as a gazebo or tarp outdoors, which has been suggested by Carla Ecola director of the Outside Project. There is plenty of creativity and ingenuity in the community, let’s apply some of that to services.
Domestically, the situation is getting worse, but that is nothing compared to what people in some regions of the world are suffering. The impact of slow onset climate change such as water shortages and decreased crop productivity is causing major displacement. In terms of global projections, one seminal 2018 report from the World bank estimated that “143 million people could be moving within their own countries by 2050 because of adverse climate impacts in three regions of the world (sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America) in the absence of urgent global and national climate action.”
The most recent IPCC (International Governmental Panel on Climate Change) report estimated approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change (high confidence). Despite these startling figures, the 1951 UN convention on refugees does not currently recognise climate refugees as refugees. In 1951, when this convention was drawn up, perhaps the situation we have today was unimaginable.
Most slow onset related movement is within the borders of people’s countries, but disaster related migration, especially when combined with conflict, can lead to people crossing borders searching for safety. Meanwhile, UK legislation over the last twelve years has grown increasingly hostile to people seeking asylum. This has culminated in the Nationality and Borders bill, which actually contradicts the 1951 UN convention on Refugees. Governments like the UK that are introducing these types of policies are forcing people into the hands of traffickers. We desperately need to activate safe passage for people fleeing conflict and climate emergency, and we and many partners are working hard to fight the racist policies and legislation brought in by this government.
However, for immediate action, we need councils to:
Activate SWEP (Severe Weather Emergency Protocol) immediately and for all heatwaves, working with commissioned partners and grassroots organisations to ensure that cool indoor spaces, drinking water and medical support are available for all who need it.
These facilities must be open to all, regardless of immigration status, and must not be conditional in any way.
We finish this blog with a statement from Octavio Rodriguez who is facing forcible displacement
“We don’t want to leave our land: here are our past, our memories, our ancestors. We don’t want to move to other parts, we don’t know what to do there.”
We are living in times of severe displacement and alienation, globally. We must respond with compassion, creativity, and a resolve to mitigate the situation. We must meet people’s practical needs and go beyond that to create relationships that are healing. At the moment, we are not even meeting the most basic needs, resulting in preventable deaths both here and across the globe. We can and must do much better.