What 1,000 Women Workers Can Teach Us About Surviving Extreme Heat

Video: ONE HOT DAY, produced by Julie Winokur & Ed Kashi / Talking Eyes Media.

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

On Sept.

2, 2026, the United Nations Environment Program report, Limiting Overshoot , declared that the world has fallen short of keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels , and that urgent action is needed to course-correct.

That same week, NPR reported that extreme heat killed nearly five times as many people in the United States as official records indicated.

These findings followed two consecutively brutal summers.

Death counts from heatwaves across Europe dominated news cycles this year as the continent’s aging infrastructure struggled to cool down.

“Heat domes” trapped heat across the United States .

But merely counting deaths from heat risks missing its impact on human life.

Each heat dome in the U.S. affected over 100 million people .

Among them were construction workers, outdoor workers , delivery workers in unairconditioned cabs, farm workers, the unhoused, the poor who could not afford air conditioning , those on medications on whom the impact of heat was amplified, those with mental health disorders, and those with little or no access to healthcare.

According to the International Labor Organization, billions of workers around the world are exposed to extreme heat every year.

While the vast majority of them do not die, many suffer deeply from the arduous ignominy of a life exposed to heat, day and night, year after year.

While counting deaths from heat is an imperfect science, the quantification of heat’s impact on mental health, physical well-being, wages, food security, habitat, and infrastructure is even more complex.