When Extreme Heat Finally Became Visible

How Hundreds of Headlines Made Extreme Heat Impossible to Ignore

How DEY. and the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center helped move extreme heat, the deadliest and least visible climate hazard, into the center of public conversation.

Extreme heat kills more people than any other climate hazard, but for years it barely registered in public conversation. Floods and hurricanes make for dramatic footage. Heat doesn't. It's hard to photograph, hard to name, and hard to pin to a single moment, so it stayed at the edge of climate reporting even as temperatures climbed and mortality followed. That gap between the scale of the problem and the attention it received framed DEY.'s presentation at the ComNet 2025 poster session.

Part of the problem is that heat feels ordinary. Everyone has been hot, and that familiarity makes it easy to dismiss, even though its effects fall hardest on people with the least ability to absorb them, and fall unevenly along lines of gender, race, class, and geography.

“The work only resonated when the stories felt close to the ground. That required examples pulled from the texture of daily life. It required visuals that translated something abstract into something recognizable. ”

Working with the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, DEY. approached this as a storytelling problem before a coverage problem. The starting move was a change in frame: treat heat not as a weather event but as a story about human lives, and about work, wages, health, housing, and daily routines. Once the frame changed, the issue became easier to see and easier to report.

In practice, that meant showing how heat cuts into labor and earnings, how it affects health both immediately and over time, how it shapes where people can live and how they move through a day, and how it compounds inequities that already exist. None of that landed as data alone. The work resonated when the stories stayed close to the ground, drawn from neighborhoods, workplaces, schoolyards, and commutes, with visuals that made something abstract recognizable.

Over time, the shift showed up in the numbers. Media mentions of extreme heat rose from roughly 5,000 in 2020 to more than 25,000 in 2024, and coverage reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Policymakers began rethinking emergency planning, local governments made changes, and communities started talking about heat as something present rather than distant. A subject that once struggled for any attention now has a durable place in the climate conversation.