Ajit Niranjan
speaker
154 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Ajit Niranjan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
On top of that, the more societal solutions like cooling centers or changing working hours.
So having one thing trade unions in a lot of Europe are calling for is to have kind of these maximum working temperatures, where if the temperature goes above that, then automatically outdoor work should cease and people should be able to stay at home and have compensation and so on for that time that they're not able to work.
Yeah, I think you can say safely that southern European countries, such as Spain and France, are definitely taking this much more seriously than northern European countries.
It feels like the political debate in countries like Germany, where I'm based, is not necessarily the culture war that has kind of been concocted around air conditioning, but more just a political reluctance to confront just how bad this is.
I mean, if you look at the death tolls we're talking about,
The World Health Organization estimates that 200,000 people have died over the last four years in Europe because of heat.
Now, if you think about the scale of that death toll, it is really hard even for the experts I speak to to wrap their heads around it.
In Europe each year, about 20,000 people die in road crashes.
The scale of heat is mind-bogglingly large in terms of how many people it kills.
And yet we don't treat it, for the most part, as a public health crisis.
But these kind of longer-term solutions are still considered radical, right?
So things like Paris, which over the last decade or so has made a huge effort to kind of go from a very car-centric city to one that pedestrianizes streets and reinstalls green spaces, removes car parking spots.
Nobody really in the debates around that in France is saying that much about how this changes the heat.
But it is an important factor.
Almost certainly not.
There will be more heatwaves to come.
I mean, we're still relatively early in the summer, aren't we?
Whether or not we'll see a heatwave as strong as the one that we saw in late June, which really was astonishingly hot.
Scientists were calling it the most severe heatwave in Europe on record.
It's unclear whether we'll get to those temperatures again, but I think it's safe to say we can expect longer periods of hot weather, some of which will again be pushing death tolls into these thousands of people.
Showing 121–140 of 154 · page 7 of 8
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