Jane Gilbert has one foot submerged in mud as she lowers a small cypress tree into the ground. Sweat seeps through her shirt, even though it’s barely hot by Miami-Dade standards: a mere 86 degrees with cloying humidity. Gilbert and a group of Girl Scouts are planting 500 native trees in the Miami-area city of Coral Gables to help mitigate climate change. “Sometimes you feel like a tadpole in front of a tsunami,” says Gilbert, “But there’s a sense of urgency because there’s so much opportunity right now.”
In 2021, Gilbert became the world’s first chief heat officer, and the opportunity she’s referring to is a constellation of federal and local support for confronting one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. She is aware that the national political winds could shift, so she’s working in overdrive to make change happen at the county level. You might call Gilbert a heat evangelist as she preaches the hazards of rising temperatures and offers the people of Miami-Dade County a path toward salvation. Since her appointment, she has helped transform one of the country’s hottest places into a beacon for resilient urban planning.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were a record 120,000 heat-related emergency room visits nationwide last year. In South Florida, it is no longer a question of if, but when the heat will become intolerable. Miami-Dade doesn’t just have summer anymore; it can have six months of temperatures above 90 degrees with 70 percent humidity. Last year, Miami had an unprecedented 42 days with a heat index at or above 105 degrees. (Although the thermometer might read 95 degrees, the heat index takes humidity into account and reflects how hot it actually feels.) By comparison, over the previous 14 years, the heat index only hit that level for an average of six days per year. When the city’s public buses flash signs that read “Go Miami Heat,” the irony is hard to miss.
Gilbert formerly served as Miami’s chief resilience officer, helping develop and implement the city’s response to climate-related pressures such as rising sea levels. Gilbert explains that historically the risk from heat has been underreported. Emergency room doctors and nurses often don’t think to identify dizziness, seizures and high body temperature as heat-related symptoms. It’s now clear, though, that heat exposure is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the country.
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This article is a selection from the September/October 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazine
In the past, heat was addressed through different sectors of the county’s Department of Emergency Management and by urban planners. “There was no one looking at how to address this issue more holistically,” Gilbert explains, “and so the idea was to have a position that would break down the silos and look at what are the big health risks and economic burdens associated with extreme heat.”
The position was created by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava with support of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which works with community partners to address the looming crisis of rising temperatures. In Miami-Dade, where the philanthropist Adrienne Arsht herself lived for many years, a 2020 survey of vulnerable communities had identified their top climate-related concern as heat, ranking it higher than sea-level rise and hurricanes. The foundation provided a $50,000 grant the first year to help fund the chief heat officer. Miami-Dade covered the balance and has supported the position since then.
Gilbert has brought together a broad coalition of partners, from government to private sector, health care professionals to labor organizers. She has been joined by heat officers from Los Angeles and Phoenix, and even as far afield as Greece, Australia, Bangladesh and Sierra Leone. The officers communicate regularly to share information and innovations.
In her first year on the job, Gilbert sought extensive input from residents, researchers and other parties before drafting the “Resilient305 Extreme Heat Action Plan.” (305 is a Miami area code.) The three-pronged approach includes educating the public, cooling homes and emergency facilities, and cooling neighborhoods.
“We really see the heat officer as an extension of the advocacy that we’ve been doing,” says Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, an immigrant workers’ organization in South Florida. “We’ve offered advice and input on their messaging, their educational materials, their efforts to try to reach out to workers and their employers.”
One of Gilbert’s first measures was to define heat season as May through October. For the kickoff this year, Gilbert raced from an event hosted by the Chamber of Commerce to the Children’s Trust, a state-funded council that supports kids’ social services, where she addressed 500 educators. Gilbert’s office provides training for camp counselors in English and Spanish (with educational materials also available in Haitian Creole). The sessions cover preventive measures, like limiting exertion and wearing light clothes, as well as the symptoms of heat exhaustion, which include dizziness, heavy sweating and cool, moist skin with goose bumps.
Low-income and unhoused people are more vulnerable to heat illness because they lack access to air conditioning and often shade. Gilbert has asked a volunteer team to steer unhoused people to cooling centers during extreme heat. Her office’s efforts have also led to the installation of 150 bus shelters, providing 1,700 air conditioners to families living in public housing and planting over 16,000 trees.
Increasing the tree canopy is a priority because trees provide shade, lower the ground surface temperature and offset carbon emissions by capturing carbon dioxide. For nearly two decades, Miami-Dade has struggled to reach its goal of 30 percent tree cover. Gilbert explains that rampant development and hurricane damage have made meeting this a Sisyphean task. The fact that the county isn’t backsliding is an achievement, she insists—it’s currently hovering around 20 percent. This year Miami-Dade will invest a record $7 million in tree planting, with an emphasis on low-income neighborhoods, which tend to have the least shade.
Gilbert collaborated with Miami-Dade County’s building official to help change the Florida building code to require more heat-reflective roofs. And she worked with the National Weather Serviceto lower the threshold for heat advisories in Miami-Date, during which the county sends warnings and helps get vulnerable people to cooling sites. Extreme heat can cause dehydration, cramps, heat exhaustion and heatstroke, which can be deadly. Prevention can be as simple as rest, shade and water.
No one understands the hazards of rising temperatures better than outdoor workers. Florida has about two million, in jobs that include farming, landscaping, roofing and construction. At Miami-Dade’s Central District Wastewater Treatment Plant, the structural maintenance team does constant cleaning and repairs. Several years ago, the team switched to four-day weeks with ten-hour days so they can start work earlier in the day when the temperatures are cooler.
For the lifeguards at Haulover Beach, long gone are the wooden lifeguard chairs where an umbrella offered a quaint circle of shade. Today, state-of-the-art towers that resemble fancy cabanas on stilts line this stretch of Miami Beach, home to the one of the top-rated clothing-optional beaches in the country. The flooring is made of aluminum so the lifeguards’ feet won’t burn, and functioning windows allow for cross ventilation.
Matthew Sparling, a captain in the county’s Ocean Rescue Bureau, demonstrates his department’s latest purchase: a portable air conditioner that looks like a cooler on wheels and actually uses ice and water to blast cold air. He says his 40 employees are responsible for keeping as many as 4,000 to 6,000 people safe each day during peak season, so if they are listless, the public’s safety is in jeopardy. The majority of the lifeguards’ job now is medical intervention, often heat related, and Sparling’s crew is trained to identify and treat heat stress, which sometimes presents as a heart attack or stroke.
Miami-Dade County employees are protected under an administrative order that Gilbert helped draft. It requires county employers to monitor and mitigate heat risk, offering special training if needed. But the safety of employees at private companies is up to their bosses. Last year, Gilbert and Mayor Levine Cava endorsed a coalition of labor groups and health care advocates that drafted a measure that would have required the county’s private employers to allow ten-minute breaks in the shade every two hours when the heat index reached 95 degrees. But Florida legislators passed a law in April that prohibits local governments from requiring employers to provide rest, water and shade for workers. The measure went even further, banning local ordinances that require employers to offer “appropriate first aid measures or emergency responses related to heat exposure protections for employees who report they have experienced excessive heat exposure.”
Public records show that the measure passed with lobbying from the Florida Chamber of Commerce and construction businesses. State Representative Tiffany Esposito, who sponsored the bill, insisted that the worker protections would be bad for business. “You want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job,” she said. “And in order to provide good jobs we need to not put businesses out of business.” The bill’s supporters did not address estimates that Miami-area businesses lose $10 billion per year in productivity due to heat-related illness.
“Human beings aren’t meant to work 10, 12 hours without breaks in 100-degree heat index like machines,” says Londoño, whose organization helped draft the overruled ordinance. “People have to understand that this is not normal,” he says, “Outdoor workers deserve protections.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Labor proposed the first-ever national rule to prevent heat illness in the workplace. “No worker should have to get sick or die because their employer refused to provide water, or breaks to recover from high heat, or failed to act after a worker showed signs of heat illness,” the department declared in a statement. The rule still needs to be finalized—a process that includes review by the public, the president and Congress. Until then, Florida’s law and similar legislation in Texas will remain in place.
Floridians are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the data showing an increasing number of extremely hot days for continuous periods of time. (During our research for this story, one tour operator in the Everglades insisted, “It’s not getting hotter; people are just getting weaker.”) Much of Gilbert’s challenge is alerting people to the consequences of rising temperatures and convincing them something can and should be done. She says doomsday histrionics in the press aren’t always helpful. Instead, she’s focusing on measures to mitigate the heat—the tangible actions that will keep Miami-Dade a viable place to live.
“By addressing this crisis, we have the opportunity to also create a better city,” says Gilbert with unflappable optimism. Along with the acute measures she’s putting in place to provide relief, she envisions a Miami that is more “nature-informed, walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented.” As she plants another cypress tree in the mud, she is demonstrating the way forward.