It’s getting really hot. How can state and local governments mitigate the negative effects?

Summary

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Priorities Podcast: “It’s Getting Really Hot. How Can State and Local Governments Mitigate the Negative Effects?”

Date: July 22, 2026
Host: Sophia Foxwell, StateScoop Reporter
Guest: Grace Wickerson, Federation of American Scientists

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on how state and local governments can better leverage data, technology, and policy to prepare for and mitigate the broad-ranging impacts of extreme heat. Grace Wickerson, lead author of the Federation of American Scientists’ Heat Policy Agenda, joins the show to discuss actionable strategies, innovative tools, and data-driven insights that are reshaping governmental response to rising temperatures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Growing Challenge of Extreme Heat

• Extreme heat is now among the fastest-growing threats to states and localities, impacting not only public health, but also infrastructure, the energy grid, worker productivity, agriculture, emergency management, and government budgets. (01:31)
• “Extreme heat can touch everything from the agricultural system to emergency managers to the grid. It’s truly a dynamic issue and requires a village of people to really solve it.” — Grace Wickerson (03:19)

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Genesis and Goals of the Heat Policy Agenda

[02:19] Grace outlines the motivations and development process behind the Heat Policy Agenda:

• Initial interest sparked ~3.5 years ago amid rising federal efforts and severe heat waves.
• The early need was for a “playbook” of evidence-based practices for governments to address heat.
• Learning from practitioners across state, local, academic, and federal spaces shaped the scope.
• Realization: While federal policy enables state/local action, there’s abundant innovation at local levels needing recognition and coordination.
• Aim: Unify a national framework and catalog for heat action—spanning agriculture, emergency management, food, health, and infrastructure.

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Key Barriers for State and Local Governments

[06:08] Challenges identified from conversations with officials:

• Lack of Dedicated Roles: While some cities have “chief heat officers” or heat czars, many who spearhead action do so outside their job descriptions.
  • “You may not have, say, a chief heat officer role...but there’s a public health emergency coordinator who’s seeing the impacts, ...energy grid operators who are starting to deal with the issues.” — Grace Wickerson (06:30)
• No Political Mandate: Without statutory requirements, much work depends on individual passion.
• Silos: Agencies like health, infrastructure, agriculture, and education operate in silos, making data sharing a critical first challenge. (08:00)

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Data Sharing and Interagency Coordination

[08:49] Notable solutions and progress:

• Best Practices in Health Sector: Local/state heat illness tracking tools (e.g., Houston’s Heat Illness Dashboard).
  • Tracks not only heatstroke, but corollary impacts — “On hot days, there’s more domestic violence events, there’s more gunshot wounds...” (09:25)
• Economic Analysis: California’s Department of Insurance pioneered tracking uninsured losses from heat, including impacts on energy, agriculture, and response costs.
• Unified Storytelling: Pulling together data reveals the full scope and helps identify targeted interventions.

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From Data to Action: Toolkits and Technology

[11:41] Examples of operationalizing data:

• Phoenix/Maricopa County, AZ: Used geolocated 911 call data for heat incidents to pinpoint “hot spots” (pun intended) and strategically place cooling centers.
  • “They were able to then put cooling centers at the sites where there was the greatest number of 911 calls.” — Grace Wickerson (12:13)
• Outreach for Unhoused and Vulnerable Populations: 911 data informs not just site locations, but direct service provision.

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The Role of “Heat Officers” and Institutional Buy-In

[13:54]

• The effectiveness of Phoenix’s Heat Office is driven by city council and mayor support; the office has a clear mandate: reduce heat illness and deaths.
  • “A heat office is really ... as effective as we empower it to be.” (14:17)
• Centralized leadership supports integration across public safety, health care, and infrastructure—could be modeled elsewhere via mandates or agency directives.

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Innovations Across the Country

[16:41] Extreme heat is not just a “hot states” issue.

• Maine: Uses public health data collection to track air conditioning coverage, guiding heat pump distribution and engagement.
• New York City: Employs “excess deaths” methods to link mortality on hot days to heat; uncovers ~500 annual deaths tied directly or indirectly to heat. Insights inform pending housing mandates for cooling.
  • “A lot of the folks who died were because they couldn’t use their air conditioning or didn’t have one.” — Grace Wickerson (19:12)
• School and Infrastructure Gaps: Many older buildings in previously cooler areas lack AC; extreme heat now forces closures and prompts new safety mandates.

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Recommendations & Action Steps for Governments

Short-Term / Immediate Actions:

• Comprehensive Data Inventory: Catalog existing datasets spanning health, infrastructure, economic impacts, and identify what can be integrated.
• Spending Study: Quantify budget allocations and costs associated with heat response—911 calls, EMS visits, cooling centers, etc. (21:36)
• Health-Driven Warnings and Thresholds: Use localized emergency department data to define public health thresholds for heat action. (23:27)
  • E.g., North Carolina tailors heat alerts by county data; California’s “CalHeat Score” ranks risk levels for targeted communication.

Long-Term / Strategic Planning:

• Climate-Forward Infrastructure Planning: Incorporate modeled future climate/temperature scenarios into building, energy, and public health standards.
  • “We are building things that are going to last for decades that were built for some other climate and not the one we’re currently in.” — Grace Wickerson (24:40)
• Advanced Modeling and AI: California using varying “weather files” to forecast performance under future heat and guide code/standard updates.
• Scenario Planning: Utilize predictive models, emerging AI tools, and “tabletop exercises” for cross-sector emergency response planning.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s truly a dynamic issue and requires a village of people to really solve it.” — Grace Wickerson [03:19]
• “You may not have, say, a chief heat officer role...but there’s a public health emergency coordinator who’s seeing the impacts...” — Grace Wickerson [06:30]
• “On hot days, there’s more domestic violence events, there’s more gunshot wounds.” — Grace Wickerson [09:25]
• “A heat office is really ... as effective as we empower it to be.” — Grace Wickerson [14:17]
• “A lot of the folks who died were because they couldn’t use their air conditioning or didn’t have one.” — Grace Wickerson [19:12]
• “We are building things that are going to last for decades that were built for some other climate and not the one we’re currently in.” — Grace Wickerson [24:40]

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Key Timestamps

• 01:31: Framing the broad and vital impact of extreme heat.
• 02:19: Development story and goals of the Heat Policy Agenda.
• 06:08: Systemic and organizational barriers at the state/local level.
• 08:49: Successful data and technology strategies.
• 11:41: Case study: Phoenix’s data-driven cooling interventions.
• 16:41: Innovations in Maine and New York City.
• 21:36: Immediate and long-term recommendations for government action.
• 24:40: Future-focused infrastructure planning and technology use.

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Takeaways

The conversation emphasizes moving extreme heat from a niche environmental/public health concern to a cross-cutting, integrated priority for all levels of government. The Heat Policy Agenda encourages:

• Breaking down data silos and empowering nontraditional leaders.
• Building institutional mandates to ensure ongoing, proactive, and data-driven heat adaptation.
• Harnessing emerging technology—from advanced predictive modeling to early warning systems and AI-driven scenario planning.
• Ensuring policy is not only generated at the federal level but shaped, operationalized, and innovated within states and localities most acutely feeling the impact.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to statescoop's Priorities podcast. I'm Sophia Foxowell, a reporter for statescoop. This week, Grace Wickerson from the Federation of American Scientists joins the podcast to discuss why better data and smarter tools are becoming essential to helping state and local governments prepare for a hotter future. But first, here are the biggest state IT stories of the week. John Cohen, executive director of the Office of Strategic Programs and Initiatives at the center for Internet Security, said it's a sign of the times that considerations of digital intrusion were this year put on equal footing with more traditional physical threats during planning for the FIFA World Cup. In an interview, Cohen said the threat environment has changed. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has told several state broadband offices that satellite Internet projects approved for federal grant fund must be reviewed. Approval of the BEAD funds will be revoked, the agency said, if states can't refute new FCC data showing the locations are no longer eligible. At least one municipal government was among those to see their Internet service disrupted after a cyber attack against a main telecommunications firm Sunday caused an outage affecting 23 towns along the state's mid coastal region. Extreme heat is becoming one of the fastest growing challenges facing state and local governments across the country, an issue that affects far more than public health. Rising temperatures threaten infrastructure, electric grid reliability, worker production, agriculture, emergency management and government budgets. To help states and local governments better mitigate heat impacts, the Federation for American Scientists this month released the Heat Policy Agenda. The report outlines how governments can use data sharing, predictive modeling and early warning systems to better understand heat risk and respond before they become disasters. Grace Wickerson, one of the report's authors, argues that preparing for heat should become a core responsibility across state agencies rather than being treated solely as an environmental or public health issue, similar to the whole of state approach to combat cybersecurity threats.

[B]

First off, just so excited. This resource is out in the world and have already gotten so much good feedback that it's usable. Folks are learning about things they didn't realize were happening and that was really our goal to create that state of play of what's going on around the country on extreme heat. So I've been leading our extreme heat work since it started. We got interested in this issue about three and a half years ago, noting that there was a number of different federal efforts that were starting to emerge on extreme heat. There was many bad heat waves back then and what we saw though was this lack of playbook. What should be all the tactics and strategies that governments should employ to address extreme heat? What Are the evidence based practices? How can we actually prevent all those real negative impacts you mentioned at the top? And so we started to just talk to people and get ourselves organized. So we spent about a couple of years getting to know people in the heat space at the state, local level, in academia, in practice, and learned about everything under the sun. Extreme heat can touch everything from the agricultural system to emergency managers to the grid. It's truly a dynamic issue and requires a village of people to really solve it. And from there we connected with federal partners and stakeholders and organized for what was our first actual heat policy agenda, which is a federal heat policy agenda that we released in early 2025. And it was at that time that we had finished this big project and realized that federal policy is important and that that I think was a good first step, but that there was a lot that we had learned along the way that was actually important to tell in its own story because federal policy can be enabling of state and local action. And also there's just so much incredible state and local action that we think people needed to know about. So we started in that early 2025 season to do another set of a lot of conversations, a lot of review of policy documents and started to pull and piece together a story of what was the state of heat action all over the country. That there were heat related actions happening in every single state and that there was a way when framework that we could unify people around to talk about extreme heat and what it did to people's health and how it impacted them and what might be the future state that we want to work towards. And so that really is what the project ended up being was here's everything we could find around extreme heat all over the country. You can find everything from food to grids. And also here's a way that we can all think about addressing extreme heat and how it impacts us in our daily lives and also impacts the communities in which we live.

[C]

That's such a thoughtful way of going about addressing a problem as widespread and ubiquitous as this. Because like you said, there can be all sorts of federal recommendations and initiatives happening at the federal level. But extreme heat emergencies, natural disasters, all of that happens locally. Local agencies have to be in vested first, they have to be included first because they're often the first line of defense, the first responders in case something happens. And then going up to the state and federal level, I'm curious, before we again go into some of the solutions and recommendations, what were some of the challenges you were finding as you were Speaking with state and local officials, not just the ones who were coming up with their own initiatives to how to address extreme heat and how it's impacting their regions and communities, but what were the challenges that they were facing and not being able to solve on their own?

[B]

That's a really good question. And I think a big thing we observed is that there is a growing number of concerned government officials who are taking on extreme heat as an issue they want to solve, whether or not they have the job title to do it. And so that was a pretty important learning, is that you may not have, say, a chief heat officer role in your place, but there's a public health emergency coordinator who is seeing the impacts, there's an emergency manager who's seeing what is happening to different services. There are energy grid operators who are starting to deal with the issues. And they all had to come to some realization that this issue, while with may not have a political mandate to act, was something that they saw and had to make a part of their job description. And so it's. It's because of a lot of these people's passion and dedication that we have so much of this important work. And I think what we want to see more of is that people, regardless of whether they have, say, a heat officer title, are, have a statutory mandate to actually think about heat, take on heat and plan for heat, because that allows communities to be more prepared for when the threat comes. And I think that dovetails to a lot of the policies that we put in this playbook is it does require someone to look at heat and not just go, that's someone else's job, but look at it and say, oh, I have a tool in my toolbox that I can use to address this problem. And it's within my work to be able to address this problem.

[C]

Yeah. Not only is it in my work, it should be a part of my work because it touches so many of these different facets. Whether or not you have a designated job title or mandate to specifically address those issues, those issues are going to be there whether they are your responsibility or not. So why not be able to have, as you said, some of the solutions and tools to be able to address them. And I wanted to talk about some of those. I imagine that a lot of these agencies, because they focus on different facets of the government, whether it's infrastructure, public health, agriculture, education, they're all kind of operate in these data silos. Did you find that was kind of the first step in being able to bring all of this data and information in one place is to be able to strengthen some of the data sharing infrastructure between these agencies.

[B]

That is a great question. And we're seeing some emerging best practices. I would say the depth of data and data into practice is happening in the health sector. So as we looked around the country, we see a number of local level and state level heat illness tracking tools. So tools that are helping not just to say there's severe mortality, but also a range of different health system impacts and health related consequences. One of my favorites is Houston has a heat illness dashboard where not only do they look at heat illnesses, they actually started to identify and find all the other health impacts that are connected to heat. One thing that's surprising and should be of concern to say public safety is that there's more domestic violence events, there's more gunshot wounds on hot days. And they looked at some of those impacts and were able to try to track them. And so that allows them to say, hey, it's not just about people getting a heat stroke or a heat stress event. It's actually all these other things that we should also be tracking and caring about. So that's really been a pretty big picture in terms of tracking more of the broader impacts. We've seen some interesting work out of the California Department of Insurance, which created the first methodology for looking at the uninsured losses that the state is experiencing because of extreme heat. So they looked not just at the health impacts of which as I said, there's a lot of data emerging on, but they looked at the impacts to energy, the impacts to the agricultural cultural system, the cost of actually responding to these events. And that's helped them to start to think about how they can then design from the Department of Insurance perspective, insurance based solutions to be able to mitigate those impacts. And that that study has been usable to other parts of government to look and say we have a equity here in getting a solution. So those are just a couple of examples of the ways we're seeing both sectoral data be used in many different ways, but also places that are starting to pull together all the different data resources and impacts to create more unified stories.

[C]

So now that certain agencies like state, local, they're, you know, they're tracking stuff about weather, healthcare, energy losses, things like that. Now that they have access to all of these data points, how do they operationalize them? How do they take action? What should they be implementing in terms of whether it's monitoring, mitigation tools, any type of technology you think that they should incorporate or adopt to help Them kind of have a better grasp or a handle on the situation.

[B]

I will answer by talking about two examples that I think illustrate what we're seeing. So one is in Maricopa county, specifically Phoenix, Arizona. What they have done has been really build deep partnerships with their emergency medical services and their 911 services. So they have geolocated data on where 911 calls are coming in for heat. And that was an incredible partnership that has allowed them to take a look and say, here are where we have pun intended. Hot spots of heat. Exactly. You gotta make a hot spot. You have to do a heat pun. And one of the decisions they were able to make based on that data was they were able to then put cooling centers at the sites where there was the greatest number of 911 calls because their impacts from heat are about a majority are those who are unhoused. So that was driving a lot of their negative impacts. And they Also, the about 20 to 25% are indoors. So that 911 call strategy allowed them to target, okay, here are the sites where there's a lot of impact. Let's put a cooling center there so that we can start to address that. And then also they've used some of that data too, to identify where there might be some households who are most vulnerable to then also try to deliver some services.

[C]

As far as I know as well, Phoenix is one of the. I mean, Arizona in the state is one of the only places in the country where there is actually a designated heat public official known as the heat Czar. I wonder, I mean, seeing the partnership that happened from geolocating all these 911 calls and then taking action and putting in a cooling center, do you think more states will, or even at the local level will adopt somebody to have this type of designated title? I know we talked about at the beginning making sure that at every facet and every agency, there is heat kind of built into some of those responsibilities or heat issues built in those responsibilities. Do you think we're going to see more officials or more agencies kind of create this position for people?

[B]

One thing that actually I think is even the position itself is really important. And what's actually even more important that actually makes the role as effective as it is is that the city council is fully bought in. They are dedicated to addressing extreme heat. The mayor is committed to seeing heat as a problem. And so when the office was created, one of the first mandates they had was, was to bring down heat illnesses and deaths. And that is fundamentally simple, but has been the Driver of their work is we are here to bring down illnesses and deaths and we will use all of our different tactics and means and authorities in the local government to make that happen. And so a heat office is really, in my opinion, as effective as we empower it to be. And Phoenix's mayor and city council have empowered it to really be as effective as it's been because with that mandate, they have been able to, as a new office, build the connections to public safety, to the fire department, to other partners, to healthcare, to be able to do this really deep, important coordinating that has made all this possible. So that can certainly be done in other places by naming someone to work on heat. I'm all for that. And it can also be done by saying this is our goal as a city or a state is to bring down illnesses and deaths. Insert agency here is responsible to make it happen by any means necessary. So what do we have at our disposal to be able to make it happen? And that can then allow the creativity to flourish of using data, informed decision making data to guide investments and all kinds of other cool tactics and strategies we've seen.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what you said about buy in is really important as well to have an acknowledgment and an agreement and kind of like a partnership and an understanding amongst everyone who works together to address a singular issue and to make sure that that continues to be the driving force behind a lot of these decisions, like adopting a certain piece of technology. This thing will be efficient, this tool can be used. But will it be used to further our aim, to further our goal? If not, is there something else that's going to be a little bit more effective to get us there? We've talked about Houston, we've talked about California, we've talked about Arizona. The heat, I mean heat is impacting all the states in the country. Have you seen other regions throughout the country kind of take on this, dismantle and implement certain solutions it technology or otherwise to start addressing these issues too?

[B]

Of course, yep, we, it's certainly we've named a couple of hot places, but one thing that was clear from this project is extreme heat is no longer contained to hot places. So a couple others maybe drawing ourselves further north. One example that's really interesting is actually out in Maine. So one of our furthest north states in the lower 48, Maine, using some of its tools for public health data collection, has been collecting data on the air conditioning coverage across the state population. And in particular like what is the cooling device that people have. So this now has a baseline set of data that they can then use to guide decision making. And a thing that is complemented is mainly is very interested in driving uptake of heat pump technology because in that state they need heating. It's cold there and it does get freezing, it gets really cold there and it also gets really hot there. So they're looking at where there's places around the state that aren't having gaps in access to AC and being able to use that data for priority engagement on heat pump distribution, which I think is really interesting because it's allowing a public health department to collect data that can then be useful for other parties and partners and using divi's tools in that effective way. So that's one as we go north and then I'll throw another around. New York City, which has started to use methods that are known as excess deaths methods. And so they work at where they're having mortality on hot days. And they've created a definition that allows them to capture not just the heat health impacts that are, you know, labeled as heat, which is a big problem in our space, but also things that like happened on a hot day and they could connect back to heat. And they found that annually about 500 people in New York City have some direct or indirect death cause of death because of extreme heat.

[C]

Oh my gosh.

[B]

So that's been incredible. Important for them to guide some of their decision making because they've looked at the populations that are being impacted and thought, if it's an older adult, what do we have in our disposal to help older adults? And it's also been important to then underlie one of the findings was a lot of the folks who died were because they couldn't use their air conditioning or didn't have one. And so given that, like really strong determinant of some of the impacts, they are working on bills to try to require cooling and homes so that landlords provide those devices. And so it's helping to even shape their policy dialogues. So really important ways that we're seeing the data actually come into life, and that's something we're really interested in, is, yes, collecting it, but making sure it's used in ways that help to drive new policy 100%.

[C]

I mean, talk about really shifting from like public health to housing and how that's all connected. Infrastructure is such a complex topic and health and heat, especially when it's impacting health in somebody's home. I mean, Maine, Portland, Washington, a lot of these states that are now experiencing extreme Heat. Their infrastructure wasn't originally built to deal with it. A lot of them don't have central heat, like central cooling. I mean, even here in California. I'm a native Californian. I grew up in the state capitol in Sacramento. I still live here. The school that I attended, it didn't have air conditioning when I was in, when I was in school there like 20 years ago. And a friend of mine is still a teacher there. It still doesn't have air conditioning. On very hot days during the school year. They have to close down. They have to close down the school because it's not safe for kids to attend. They can't pay attention, they could pass out. It creates so much risk for everyone involved. So it's really interesting to see how this data can be applied and changed so it can. Laws can be updated to mandate housing when new housing is built or even repair existing housing to make sure schools have air conditioning. To look at the populations that are most impacted, seniors, unhoused, you know, aging regions of the country. So I love hearing that a lot of these tools are being action. I know that we're coming up on time, but I wanted to ask if you are starting to advise either a state technology office or, or a state or local agency that had come to you and said, hey, we want to start taking action on extreme heat in our communities. What are some of the solutions that you would recommend that they immediately take? Outline some short term ones, the immediate action items, and then let's talk about some longer term ones too.

[B]

Cool. Well, because of playbooks that have been built like by California, we think there's an opportunity to start by just doing a data inventory. What from all the different ways we see a heat impact, our people, infrastructure and economy. What do you kind of, what data sources are you collecting that you could pull into one place? I would also complement that with a spending study because what we have actually realized is even in the places that are driving the best innovations on extreme heat, they still don't even have a handle on how much of their budgets are going to heat response. There's some, some research out there in Los Angeles county, but it's done by a third party. So we think there's also an opportunity to say maybe on our hottest days, how much, how many more 911 calls do we get, how many more EMS visits, our EMS services are being used, police even, to even get some kind of cost assessment going or a cost of running a cooling center. What is that actually kind of the bottom line? So that's Piece one is let's pull the data together. I think the piece two is what are some of the highest priority items that folks are committed to work on. I think we've seen a lot of places start with human health, which makes sense given how widely impactful this is on our health and safety. So with that data we can then try to guide maybe some warnings. So something I two examples we've seen North Carolina use their ED data, their emergency department data to inform the thresholds that they see as when heat becomes dangerous. And those are modifiable based on every single county in the state.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

So that is really interesting because it was there, they got the data, they then tailored it to the temperature, and now those thresholds are public health informed. Similar work is in California with calheat Score, which is a ranking tool for heat. They look similarly at historical data and then use that to create a ranking system to help people also start to understand the different levels of heat risk and what they should do at different levels of risk. That feels like a really important, again, starting point in the medium term that we need to have to be able to guide our decisions every single summer and know how do we talk about heat to a broader population. I think the longer term thing that we think is really important as well is how do we take what is coming in terms of future heat, which we're starting to get a better understanding of how to project out to and use future conditions to guide our decisions. Now because a lot of ways that we build, say infrastructure or homes, uses like this history of weather files and the history of what weather looked like, it doesn't often use what the future of weather is going to look like.

[C]

Very true.

[B]

And that's a problem because we are building things that are going to last for decades that were built for some other climate and not the one we're currently in. So I think there's some interesting work to be done to use the models that are starting to emerge around different scenarios in future states and make sure that the things that we're building actually can tolerate those different temperatures because we should be building for that future. And that will also save us money down the line. And so there's. That's more of an exploratory area. But I certainly think with technology we have a lot of opportunity to start doing that future forecasting as we're making those bigger decisions.

[C]

What type of technology do you mean? Are we talking about like using artificial intelligence for some type of weather modeling or like tabletop exercises in terms of emergency response or infrastructure building, public health modeling. Are you talking about predictive assessments or algorithms, any type of automation tools? Is there anything that you can recommend or that you've seen being used?

[B]

So I know a lot of what we have been seeing are a lot of predictive modeling. So there's some work that's being done in California. California's a big leader. They have different weather files that they've built that essentially are future temperature conditions that could be experienced in say, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. And so they bring that future state into their current models to and test how different infrastructure can handle them. So that's been really interesting to build these nice models and then use that, what the output is to input into what do we already make decisions around building codes or energy codes or the grid. There's certainly a lot of opportunity too for artificial intelligence tools to model all those different scenarios, particularly because heat is so complex now. What do you do if it's many, many days of like highs of 100, but then hot nights because then your buildings aren't able to cool down, your people aren't able to cool down? We could very much run all those different scenarios and then try to figure out what are different interventions to bring down those impacts. I would say that's still more of my in the dreaming state, but I certainly know that folks are interested in starting to move in that direction in the future.

[A]

Thank you to Grace Wickerson for participating in that conversation. You can subscribe to the priorities podcast@priorities podcast.com and wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, be sure to leave a review or rating on the podcast page. That small extra step helps more people like you find the show. This podcast is a production of Scoop News Group in Washington, dc. Our producer, Carlin Fisher, puts it together until next week. I'm Sophia Foxwell. Thanks for listening.