Heat waves come and go, and when this happens increase frequency and magnitude — as this year’s record-breaking temperatures show — go away from attention once things cool down. What is not going away is the permanent and costly damage they are doing to the basic infrastructure we rely on in our daily lives.
Hotter days and nights can result many deaths people (those who can’t afford air conditioners especially) and they turn it on forest hells of terrible power. Some of these make the news, but what doesn’t make the headlines is the destruction of roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure.
However the cost is there, it grows faster every summer – and it will have to be paid by current and future generations. It’s a cost that could eventually reach trillions of dollars.
Climate change resulting from human activities in general, and its manifestation in the form of preventing heat in particular, has been. covered with shadow and renewed wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, but the consequences are increasing with each summer’s warming and cannot be ignored.
Some are taking precautions. On July 15, Reuters reported on Europe’s race to protect infrastructure from the heat as “rails seize in heat, roads melt and power grids crash”. A recently published book, Impacts of Climate Change on Infrastructure, it examines how the equipment works outside or with a high level of tolerance because it was built on ideas that did not include climate change or bad weather.
The problem, of course, is not unique to the European continent, and it is not new. As the report of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) stated in 2023, “Infrastructure financing and climate change are the issues facing Asia and the Pacific today.
