‘Heat waves and fires will be a big part of our future’, says Athens Heat Secretary

Eleni Myrivili likes the heat and sunny days. At the same time, he finds it exhausting having to walk through very hot streets, without trees, without shadows. Myrivili’s job is more or less this, to make the city of Athens fresher and more pleasant.

She is the heat secretary for the Greek capital, one of the first people in the world, already impacted by climate change, to hold a position like this. After all, even if you like the heat, everything has a limit.

Or rather, it should have a limit: 1.5°C increase, in relation to the pre-industrial period, according to the world’s nations agreed (on paper, considering that successive alerts do not seem to wake governments to action) in the Agreement from Paris.

Heat waves around the world, including in Myrivili’s Athens, are longer and stronger these days. “And it will get worse” as we approach the 1.5°C that seems inevitable to be surpassed, says the secretary of Heat. “It’s one of the reasons I was nominated.”

At the end of November, she opened the Green Nation Worldwide event, focused on sustainability, with a lecture entitled “Just like forests, cities also burn”.

Myrivili is on a mission to make Athens more resilient to heat waves. One of the concerns is the elderly, who are more vulnerable to high temperatures. The way is to build actions to ensure the greatest possible freshness in the homes of the elderly, with the possibility of even moving.

The biggest difficulty of his work, says Myrivili, is to make the heat central in the discussions, not just an “extra” in the city’s issues.

“It won’t be easy to change people’s minds and how things are done quickly, in time,” he says. “We have to start preparing for the heat. Heat waves and fires will be a big part of our future.”

Read the interview with the secretary below.

You are Heat’s secretary, one of the first people in the world with such a position. What do you do in your day to day work? A Heat Secretary wakes up every morning and tries to think about how to make the city better prepared for heat waves and how to protect the most vulnerable.

But she also thinks about how to make cities more livable and more beautiful, more interesting for locals and tourists. Bring more nature to it, make it more sustainable and egalitarian.

You’ve been in the job for a few months now. What has already been put in place and what are the plans to control the heat of Athens in the coming years years old? A team of scientists is working on a specific methodology to determine the best way to categorize heat waves. Our plan is for this to be the first summer in Athens where there will be names and categorization for heat waves.

That will be really fantastic and makes a huge difference. Each category will have a higher or lower risk rating for people in the city. I think it will help with media communication and it will also help policymakers decide and standardize how to react to different types of heat waves.

We are also involved in a major project to cool the city. We are bringing together ten municipalities in the Athens metropolitan area to redesign green areas using water from an ancient Roman aqueduct that we have not been using for a long time.

It’s an amazing monument built in the year 150. I hope this becomes a pilot project to create guidelines on how to build nature-based solutions to lower temperatures.

A few weeks after you took office, big fires broke out in the country. Did you participate, in any way, in combat actions? I wasn’t involved. I was in my apartment working, doing a lot of interviews.

The fire was about 30 km or 40 km from the city. It was extremely hot and raining ash on everything. We couldn’t breathe. The city was empty and the sky red. It was horrible.

Heat waves are not such a recent phenomenon in Europe. Why has a position like yours been thought of only now, and why in Athens? The last decade was the hottest in history. The fact that we’ve had hot flashes before is true, but the ones we have now are much longer and much hotter. And this is a consequence of climate change.

And it will get worse. It’s one of the reasons I was nominated. The forecasts, according to the IPCC report [Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas] August are that we will not be able to stay below 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels, as was signed in the Paris Agreement.

In Athens, for example, we believe that by the middle of the century we will have hotter and longer heat waves, up to 15 or 20 days, in the summer. We have to start preparing for the heat.

We’ve talked about global warming for decades, but we haven’t talked about how to protect cities, which are getting warmer and warmer, because of the way they were built and the number of people who live in them. Cities are vulnerable. Heat waves and fires will be a big part of our future and we have to prepare for them.

Greece has a large number of older people, which is worrying for heat waves. How are you preparing to deal with this problem for this population? You’re absolutely right, that’s right. We have to protect the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to the heat. We have already put in place a program called Help At Home Plus.

We’re training people to make sure there can be help with the heat. That means checking out the seniors’ apartment and trying to see ways to make the place cooler. Many of these elderly people suffer from energy poverty, are pensioners, and, even those with air conditioning, sometimes cannot afford to turn on the device.

We have to make sure we’re building the right capacities in the homes or finding ways to help these people move. Women who live alone with young children also need support.

What is the biggest challenge of a Heat Department? My main challenge is to transform these policies that I mentioned into something mainstream, not an “extra”. Making everything we do in the city take into account temperatures and climate change.

It will be difficult to teach old dogs new tricks. It won’t be easy to change people’s minds and how things are done quickly, in time. Because we only have a decade to prevent very destructive results from the option of letting climate change run free.

Have any of your friends or family members, or yourself, ever had a problem with hot flashes? What are your memories regarding heat? I have known people who have died from the heat in Greece and Canada.

What comes to my mind is how unbearable it is to walk in a very hot summer sun. And I like the heat. I prefer summer to winter, I love sunny days. But it is paralyzing to walk on a very hot street, without shadows, without trees.

Making the city’s open spaces more attractive to people is part of my role. Many people cannot leave the cities. When heat waves start, the poorest people are stuck.

Rich people can go elsewhere, but not people who live in poor neighborhoods, which are the most exposed to heat, with fewer trees and infrastructure. We need to make sure these people are protected.

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Eleni Myrivili

A professor at the University of Aegean, she is a senior advisor for resilience and sustainability in Athens. In 2015, she began her tenure as Secretary of Resilience of the Greek city and, in 2017, she launched the Athens resilience strategy for 2030. In the area of ​​sustainability and adaptation, she has been working within the Athenian administration since 2014.