Excerpt:
More than 61,000 people died because of Europe’s record-shattering heat wave last summer, scientists have concluded. And that’s probably still an underestimation.
The figure is just shy of the 70,000 excess deaths researchers attribute to another exceptional heat wave that swept Europe in 2003. That disaster helped raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and the continent’s general lack of heat action plans.
Yet the new findings suggest that in the two decades since, efforts to prepare for a hotter future and protect the continent’s most vulnerable populations have fallen short.
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There’s also a lot that you can do within the bounds of more traditional architecture to control heat movement, and which are easy to retrofit onto existing homes. For example, there’s the extremely rad sounding thermal labyrinth, and also lots of things without rad names like planting trees where they’ll shade your building or painting your roof white. It’s frankly kinda astonishing how much you can reduce your heating and cooling requirements with simple and (relatively) low cost changes like those.