If businesses were feeling the economic heat, the past week has seen the climate and academia seriously turn up the temperature.

The first of tennis’ grand slam events, the Australian open entered its second week in Melbourne and players and fans were suffering in 40°C  heat causing the organisers to implement special protocols to protect the health of the players.

The state of Victoria has recorded  its hottest temperatures on record. The country’s Bureau of Meteorology said the two towns of Hopetoun and Walpeup reached 48.9°C on Tuesday afternoon. The figure has exceeded the previous highest temperature of 48.8°C, recorded at Hopetoun on 7 February 2009 dubbed as Black Sunday.

The extreme heat has prompted calls in Australia to move heatwaves to the same level as other major natural storm perils and name them similar to hurricanes, cyclones and major storms.

The rationale is that heatwaves are mow becoming serious threats to lives, and that storms are named and heatwaves are not, lessened the threat in the eyes of the public.

The call comes hot in the heels of a new study by a team at the University of Oxford which found that almost half of the global population (3.79 billion) will be living with extreme heat by 2050 if the world reaches 2.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels – a scenario that climate scientists see as increasingly likely.

They add most of the impacts will be felt early on as the world passes the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. In 2010, 23% of the world’s population lived with extreme heat, and this is set to grow to 41% over the next decades.

The study found countries with colder climates will see a much larger relative change in uncomfortably hot days, more than doubling in some cases.

Given that the built environment and infrastructure in these countries are predominantly designed for cold conditions, even a moderate increase in temperature is likely to have disproportionately severe impacts compared with regions that have greater resources, adaptive capacity, and embodied capital to manage heat.

Dr Radhika Khosla, Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and leader of the Oxford Martin Future of Cooling Programme, explained: “Our findings should be a wake-up call. Overshooting 1.5°C of warming will have an unprecedented impact on everything from education and health to migration and farming. Net zero sustainable development remains the only established path to reversing this trend for ever hotter days. It is imperative politicians regain the initiative towards it.”

All this in the week the USA formally withdrew from the Paris agreement and began its programme of ramping up its oil and gas operations to deliver greater energy self-sufficiency.

It makes the mountain that is the ability to limit the global temperature rise a harder one to climb.

Jon Guy, Editor,

Emerging Risks