Minderoo Foundation to fund AU$6 million worth of new research combatting lethal humidity

21 Sept 2024 – A global early warning system for deadly humid heatwaves is among 10 new projects to share in almost AUD$6 million (US$4 million) worth of research grants from Australia’s Minderoo Foundation.

The grant recipients were announced at UN Headquarters on Saturday night (New York time) in front of Ministers and Ambassadors at an event to mark the official launch of the Lethal Humidity Global Council (LHGC) on the eve of Climate Week.

To mark the launch, the LHGC has released a statement calling on world leaders to abolish “net zero” and commit to Real Zero – which would see the elimination of fossil fuels without offsets or carbon capture.

Leading scientific voices to have already signed the Real Zero statement include:

• Professor Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor and Director of Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at University of Pennsylvania
• Dr Bill Hare, CEO at Climate Analytics
• Professor Johan Rockstrom, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam, and
• Dr Sylvia Earle, world-renowned oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer at Large

It comes after UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for an urgent and concerted effort to enhance international cooperation to address extreme heat and warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the dangers posed by humid heatwaves.

The LHGC consists of climate scientists, economists, public health experts and policymakers from leading research institutions, including Climate Analytics, Tsinghua, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford universities, and the Indian Institute of Technology.

The aim of the Council is to drive near-term policy outcomes that match the scale of climate change, through world-leading research that exposes the already significant impacts of lethal humidity on human survival and health, food and water security, migration, and productivity.

Saturday night’s event, which saw opening remarks from Dr Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, finished with a call to action for Member States at highest risk of impact from lethal humidity – including India, China, parts of West Africa, South-East Asia, Pacific Island States and South America – to join forces during the high-level General Debate at the upcoming 79th session of the UN General Assembly.

In 2023, the IPCC stated that one of the greatest hazards posed by near-term 1.5°C warming was the impact of “dangerous” humid heatwaves on human mortality.

“This means that of all the dangerous impacts of the climate crisis, humid heatwaves are one of the nearest dangers we face according to major scientific consensus,” Minderoo Foundation Founder Dr Andrew Forrest AO said.

One of the projects to receive Minderoo funding will be led by a trio of climate scientists: Professor Louise Slater at Oxford University, Professor Nerilie Abram at the Australian National University and Professor Katrin Meissner, Director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Together, they will create a global early warning system for deadly humid heatwaves using cutting edge machine learning techniques.

“This project seeks to produce the first global forecasts of excess mortality associated with lethal humidity weeks – and even months – ahead of time by training machine learning models on available high-resolution climate and mortality data and generating predictions,” Professor Meissner said.

“The tool will ultimately be able to predict events in advance and deliver a public portal for predictions that anyone can use. The advantages are clear: we can plan accordingly for these increasingly devastating events, but we can no longer say we had no idea they were coming.”

Another project to receive Minderoo funding is the Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies led by Dr Satchit Balsari and Dr Caroline Buckee at Harvard University. Delivering the largest dataset of its kind, the project will follow hundreds of working women in the poorest communities in South Asia, to map for the first time the heat and humidity they are exposed to in their own homes and workplaces for an entire year – and the impact on their health and livelihoods.

“Most studies on lethal humidity have been performed on young, male populations such as military personnel and athletes, or on select outdoor workers for short durations,” Dr Balsari said.

“This study is conducted in the actual lived environments of members of the Self Employed Women’s Association, comprising a range of occupations in the informal economy, from street vendors to salt-pan workers.”

“At a time when governments around the world are setting thresholds for early warnings and heatwaves response, findings from this study will greatly improve the calibration of these thresholds to protect the health and wages of the poorest. The study provides tools to measure the efficacy of adaptation interventions ranging from cool roofs to parametric heat insurance products where workers receive cash relief when it is too hot to work.”

Dr Forrest said the LHGC would equip leaders with the science behind lethal humidity and its devastating impacts to drive urgent action on reducing global fossil fuel emissions that are causing climate change.

“There is scientific consensus that rising humidity and heat already poses a danger to human life, and that the impacts will worsen and become more widespread across the globe as temperatures rise,” Dr Forrest said.

“At temperatures as low as 30°C (86°F), under conditions of high humidity, the human body struggles to cool down by sweating. Death can result.”

Dr Forrest said transitioning away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible was the only way to prevent the already harmful impacts of climate change – including humid heatwaves, extreme flooding, drought and forest fires – from escalating further.

“We must achieve Real Zero fossil fuel emissions as soon as possible,” he said. “Net Zero has become a meaningless mantra that just buys companies and governments time while they continue to burn fossil fuels, as long as they promise to use offsets or carbon capture and storage (CCS). But there is no evidence that offsets or CCS can scale to take up even a fraction of our emissions.

“The only solution is to stop burning fossil fuels.”