Extreme heat is a systemic, accelerating threat that affects health, economics, and infrastructure, demanding a coordinated, technology-led response across multiple layers.

Layer 2—Built Environment: implement low- to zero-energy cooling, radiative and passive cooling, and scalable urban cooling with favorable return on investment.

Layer 5—Infrastructure Resilience: strengthen grid management, durable materials, and long-duration energy storage to ensure reliable services during heat spikes.

Layer 1—Sensing and Intelligence: deploy physiological and air-quality monitors, AI forecasting, and analytics, with pilot results showing clear safety and economic benefits.

Layer 3—Human Response: use wearable cooling, worksite safety alerts, and practical cooling garments to protect people who cannot stay indoors.

Current barriers include knowledge gaps, inequitable risk exposure, and design failures; leadership must improve data sharing, pilots, procurement pathways, and risk communication.

Layer 6—Ecosystem Response: focus on coral restoration and monitoring tools to track ecosystem health amid warming oceans.

Economic and productivity impacts are substantial, with projections of billions in losses if heat resilience is not strengthened and global working hours decline.

Layer 4—Systems and Capital: enable resilience in food supply and agriculture through cold storage, agritech inputs, and supportive finance mechanisms.

What leaders can do now: accelerate adoption via pilots and field data, treat heat mitigation as infrastructure, expand tools like HeatAgenda.US and Extreme Heat toolkits, and pair tech deployments with public health, labor standards, and cultural seriousness.

A proposed six-layer extreme heat tech stack spans sensing, built environment, human response, systems and capital, infrastructure resilience, and ecosystem response, with concrete examples and partners.

Heat is cumulative and deadly over sequences of hot days, increasing mortality and placing a heavier burden on health systems and marginalized communities.