Massachusetts’ first heat resilience officer eyes data, technology for statewide response to extreme heat
Massachusetts’ first heat resilience officer is looking to data, mapping technology and emergency communications to help the state better prepare and respond to extreme heat, a growing threat that has historically received less attention in the Northeast.
Katie Schlick, who took the role in August, will lead coordination across state and local governments and work with communities to prepare for rising temperatures, protect public health and reduce the impacts of extreme heat.
Gov. Maura Healey announced Schlick’s appointment last month at the state’s Clark University, home to the Human-Environment Regional Observatory Program, which studies how communities experience environmental change and how local planning can reduce climate risks. Massachusetts and Arizona are the only two U.S. states to appoint statewide heat officers to combat rising extreme temperatures.
“Extreme heat is becoming more common, more intense and more dangerous in Massachusetts,” said Healey. “We need to be ready for what that means for our families and communities. This new role will lead our work to prepare for extreme heat and make sure we’re doing everything we can to keep Massachusetts and our residents safe.”
In an interview, Schlick said her initial priority will be building the data infrastructure needed to understand how extreme heat is affecting communities, critical infrastructure like utilities, public health and the state’s economy. That could include combining data on heat-related illnesses and deaths with information about housing, cooling access, transportation, schools, agriculture and vulnerable populations.
StateScoop: How does it feel to step into this brand new role that hasn’t existed in Massachusetts before?
Katie Schlick: I think it’s really exciting and, as a young person working in climate, it’s been really motivating and inspiring to see one of our elected leaders in Gov. Healey showing real leadership and taking what we know to be a real risk to the public health and safety of the people across Massachusetts, but also across the United States and globally, and turning that that into action.
SS: I would love to know the catalyst for creating this role. Beyond rising temperatures and how they’re impacting everything from infrastructure to agriculture to education to healthcare, extreme heat has been ubiquitous for some time. Why do you think it took the state so long to recognize this need?
KS: I think that what we’re really seeing is that extreme heat is showing up in every corner and every community of the state, in our built environment, our natural environment and ecosystems, that’s affecting our economy, our infrastructure, roadways and our communities. In Massachusetts, it’s true that the state has warmed by more than three and a half degrees over the past century or so, and most of that warming has occurred since the ’90s. And we’re expecting those numbers to double or triple in the next couple of decades. We know that globally and nationally, extreme heat is the number one killer and kills more people than floods, fires, and hurricanes combined, which is really staggering. New research from Boston University found that those deaths are almost certainly an undercount, and actually we could be looking at more than a factor of five greater numbers of heat-related deaths in the United States. The governor sees this as a real threat to the people of Massachusetts, but also an opportunity to pull more people into the fold and move towards solutions. My job is really to connect those different dots across researchers, regional planning agencies, and local governments who have already been leading the charge in figuring out how to tackle extreme heat, and we need more data to do it.
SS: You mentioned building a better data infrastructure to connect these historically siloed state and local agencies, so everyone has access to the same type of underlying foundation. What role do you see technology — like heat sensors, radar, lidar, GIS mapping, satellite imagery — playing as you move forward and think about making Massachusetts more resilient?
KS: What Arizona has stood up, one of the first things that they tackled was getting down this data infrastructure so that they could track more closely these heat-related illnesses and heat-related deaths. One of the approaches that we see very early on is we need to get our arms around the full challenge all across the economy. What are the impacts to our crops and food security in the state? When you think about our built environment, you know how many homes have access to cooling infrastructure. How many folks have the ability to actually turn on their air conditioning on the hottest of days? Do they have access to a cooling center? Do we have safe transportation to get them there? Heat can buckle roadways and cause all sorts of slowed mass transit systems… Can we look at all these impacts and put numbers to them? Because when we can quantify it, then we can direct resources and partnerships to strengthen and fill those gaps. Then we can look at the technologies that we have to map, to visualize, to track and to present that information and communicate it.
SS: What are some of the challenges or obstacles you anticipate running into as you move forward with connecting all of these historically siloed agencies?
KS: Part of the challenge will be in standing up this very holistic data infrastructure. I’m really focused on making sure that we have the fullest understanding possible of the problem, cutting across all of these agencies, in every corner of the state. So that in and of itself I think will be a heavy lift. I also want to make sure that we are as inclusive of all our different vulnerable populations and the different geographies across the state. There’s also a kind of communications challenge, just in the sense of getting people to think about and see the opportunity in Massachusetts being a proactive leader on an issue like extreme heat. It’s obviously generally thought of as a cold-weather state, and I’m from New England, and I know how much snow we get up here. I know growing up in Connecticut, there was always more snow in the Boston area than there was in Connecticut. Our infrastructure was built to withstand snow and really icy temperatures, and our buildings are built to keep the heat in. And our government structures are built to activate in a cold-weather scenario. We just need to start rethinking now that we are seeing increasingly long heat seasons and an increased number of unhealthy heat days. We are seeing in the data that we are just not as prepared to handle that. But we know this is preventable.
There’s some really interesting social science research that talks about the gap between what we perceive as our risk from extreme heat versus what our actual exposure risk is from extreme heat. That gap is the greatest in our northern states. So I think this role will be really critical in helping to close that gap. This work is about getting into the weeds of all these different government levers that we can pull on the new technologies we can deploy: getting more heat pumps out there, shoring up our electric grids that it’s more reliable and more affordable, protecting our workers indoor and outdoor, protecting our kids, our youngest and our oldest populations, but it’s also going to be about making sure everyone is aware of the risk and knowledgeable about the resources they can utilize to keep themselves safe even on the hottest and the smokiest of days.
SS: How are you going to measure progress your office is making over time?
KS: I’ve been very excited to kind of read the broader framing of just how important it is to get this data infrastructure down as early on as possible, so that we can get a real understanding of where we need to direct our resources based on where the greatest need arises. So part of the metrics is going to be really understanding again across all these different state sectors and different vulnerable populations. I hate to just say ‘quantify,’ because it’s more than that. There’s so many lived experiences attached to all this. You may have workers who are working at a lower productivity level because the human body is not meant to work in those kinds of conditions; what is the economic cost as a result of that? When you look at the different heat-related, heat-caused illnesses and deaths, making sure that our medical examiners know how to classify that so that we have the data to report on it. In our school systems, how many of our schools have air conditioning now? It’s also understanding the number of people that we’re reaching through our heat alerts. When we hear a storm is coming, we all watch the news. We all learn the guidance and what you’re supposed to do. Do we have a similar kind of communications educational infrastructure set up on these unhealthy heat days? There’s this amazing program in North Carolina, which I’m familiar with from my work at the U.S. Climate Alliance, where they have helped municipal governments stand up heat action planning and tabletop exercises in their communities, so that not just at the state level where you’re thinking about this in terms of your emergency management planning and hazard mitigation planning, but that’s embedded in all of your your local infrastructure and regional infrastructure. So I think we’ll be working really closely there.
SS: I’m glad you mentioned your previous work in the U.S. Climate Alliance, because I wanted to ask you what lessons you have learned over the course of your career that you’re bringing with you into this one.
Katie Schlick: Being on the first-ever White House climate team, I think that there I really saw how we can bring this whole-of-government systems approach to tackling climate change to life. With the Biden-Harris administration, it was very much focused around cutting across climate, equity, jobs, and justice, and we had literally a director hired for every sector of the economy, whether it was transportation, or ag lands, or resilience, or having a whole team dedicated to environmental justice. One of the biggest things I took away from my two years there was how much you can get done when you throw that weight of government behind you and when you have leadership that’s really pushing for change and advocating in every room they’re in. Having worked then across state government this past year and a half with the U.S. Climate Alliance, I also have a huge understanding for the role of state government. It’s a systems-level thinking, but it’s also just a real understanding of the capacity of government to do good, and that’s something that I think we need to be leaning into. We have to hold on to how much we can do and how government can help us solve really big problems like climate change, like extreme heat impacts on our communities. So I’ll be bringing an ability to do some bigger-picture visioning of what a more heat-resilient Massachusetts can and will look like.
