With average temperatures rising across Australia, extreme heat is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue facing communities, particularly in places such as the Northern Territory and Western Sydney. As Andy Hamilton SJ reminds us, the impacts of extreme heat are not distributed or felt evenly and therefore make it a fundamental issue of social justice.
Extreme Heat Awareness Day was initiated in Australia in 2025. It is an important day because it encourages us to see climate change through the effects that it has on people, and to ask how we must change our lives to respond to it. It calls for change in the way in which we build and insulate houses, clear land from trees and plant trees in our suburbs, design prisons and public buildings, and care for children and elderly people. Its impact is felt particularly by people experiencing disadvantage and so least equipped to endure it.
Extreme heat threatens people’s health by worsening medical conditions and can lead to life threatening conditions such as sunstroke. It can also affect our health and well-being in less immediately noticeable ways. It has the greatest impact on people in later life, young children, pregnant women, people who suffer from chronic health problems and those who are socially isolated. Heatwaves can worsen medical conditions or cause potentially fatal health problems, like heatstroke. It not only directly causes illness but also affects the energy people need to spend on caring for themselves, their children and others, and the efficiency with which they can work.
Extreme heat also disproportionately affects persons who are experiencing disadvantage in other ways. For that reason, addressing it is our concern at Jesuit Social Services. We need to think only of its impact on Indigenous people sentenced to remote prisons where the temperature can reach the high forties. As our Dropping off the Edge research has indicated, throughout Australia, too, people who are disadvantaged in many ways are clustered in areas that are also particularly vulnerable to high temperatures. Those who experience disadvantage are more likely to live in badly insulated and inadequately cooled homes, live in areas where there is little tree canopy cover, lack access to public transport and also to cool public spaces. They’ll likely be both disproportionately affected by extreme heat, and defenseless against it. Extreme heat is a social as well as a medical problem.
For this reason, when we think of social justice, we need to include extreme heat and the other effects of climate change. They touch the people for whom we care deeply.
