Athens Opened Its Libraries as Refuges From the Heat

Athens appointed Eleni Myrivili in 2021 as Europe's first chief heat officer, and the city's response has run on two tracks: warn accurately, and give people somewhere to go. Its heat wave categorisation uses an algorithm that combines heat, humidity and air pollution with local historical mortality data, sorting forecast events into three tiers from dangerous to extremely dangerous, and varying the warning by neighbourhood — because the same heatwave is not the same experience in a dense concrete district as in a leafy one. Alongside the warnings the city opened cooling centres in libraries, community halls and public buildings, ordinary air-conditioned rooms made available and publicised; seven of them recorded more than 35,000 visits during the summer 2023 heatwaves. Myrivili has since become global chief heat officer for UN-Habitat, and the Athens categorisation model has been adapted by other cities.