Africa’s First Heat Officer Faces Climate Change in Sierra Leone

Barrie, who sells homemade charcoal for income, says she suffers from chest pains and breathing difficulties due to the heat, particularly during Sierra Leone’s scorching December-to-April dry season, when temperatures can soar above 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). 

“I don’t understand why it’s happening,” says Barrie, shaking her head when asked if she knows what climate change is. “But I know it’s getting warmer.”

Freetown, like many cities around the world, is increasingly threatened by dangerous temperatures. A study published in the scientific journal PNAS last year found that extreme heat exposure in 13,115 cities nearly tripled between 1983 and 2016, affecting 1.7 billion people. The researchers found that the health risk of extreme heat is “highly unequal and severely impacts the urban poor.”

To confront the issue, Freetown announced a new hire in November: a chief heat officer, the first in Africa.

Eugenia Kargbo, who works as an advisor to Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, has been tasked with raising public awareness of extreme heat, improving protection and responses to heat waves, and collecting, analyzing and visualizing heat impact data across this city of 1.2 million people, using tools like Freetown’s tree database Treetracker.

“Climate change is in front of us now,” says Kargbo. “The heat is already here and it’s unbearable. What we’re experiencing in Freetown right now has never happened before — it’s unprecedented. We need adaptation, not just mitigation. I need to make my city a safer, cooler place.”

In 2017, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranked Sierra Leone third, after only Bangladesh and Guinea Bissau, on its list of countries most vulnerable to climate change. Many of these risks are concentrated in its capital and largest city, where a combination of civil war, climate-change-induced crop failure and rural poverty helped fuel explosive urbanization. Some 35% of Freetown’s population live in 74 informal settlements such as Kroo Bay, often in disaster-prone areas like the seafront or hillsides. Homes are typically temporary structures made of “heat trap” metal sheets. In 2017, flooding and mudslides killed more than 1,000 people in Freetown and last March a fire in a slum made 7,000 people homeless.

“The city’s population is exploding around us and that’s putting a lot of stress on the city,” says Aki-Sawyerr. “It’s like living in a pressure cooker.”

Kargbo’s role is part of an Atlantic Council-led initiative that has also brought heat officers to Miami-Dade County and Athens, Greece; Los Angeles and Phoenix have hired officials dedicated to fighting extreme heat at their own initiative. Like her counterparts in the U.S. and E.U., Kargbo plans to combat rising temperatures with a mix of infrastructural and policy changes. She’s leading Freetown’s project to plant a million trees and build 48 urban gardens, working with telecommunications companies to send out weather warnings, and constructing “cooling centers” with shade and water in slums. There’s also a plan to improve sanitation by creating waste collection jobs for 800 youths. 

“The work Eugenia is doing is not just for Freetown,” says Aki-Sawyerr. “The human cost of extreme heat is something all cities need to learn about.”

Other heat officers in Africa may soon follow: Kargbo says she has been advising other Sierra Leonean mayors, as well as the mayor of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia.

Kathy Baughman McLeod of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which has funded the first year of chief heat officers in Freetown, Athens and Miami-Dade, says she expects one to be on every continent by the end of the year.

“We are intent on being flexible for communities and mayors,” she says. “How best will they address the role? We will try for a year and see how it goes.”

Following a few months of success, McLeod says Miami has already incorporated the heat officer role into its budget. But in cities like Freetown, where many residents live in extreme poverty and municipal services are far more fragile, “there’s a different set of challenges,” she says. The post may require more long-term support. “We will maybe be there in year two and three and four, but we want to make sure it works,” McLeod says. “This is an experiment. But this role is perhaps more important in Africa than other regions.” 

Mayor Aki-Sawyerr underlines those disparities. “In Athens, they decided to install water fountains around the city, but only 47% of people in Freetown have access to running water,” she says.

Lack of data is another barrier. The number of people exposed to heat waves between 2000 and 2016 increased by 125 million, according to the World Health Organization. But in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers say that data can be understated. Autopsy and mortality figures, Aki-Sawyerr says, are not reliable. And the mayor doesn’t know the city’s precise population. “It’s only an estimate of between 1.2 and 1.5 million,” she says. “We need to know the real numbers to make improvements.”

Though African countries account for only 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions — a share dwarfed by China, the U.S., and the E.U. — experts believe the continent is likely to feel the heat more than other regions, and its residents, many of whom depend on subsistence agriculture, are more acutely threatened by drought and flooding. The World Meteorological Organization has warned that Africa’s overall GDP will decrease by 2.25% to 12.12% due to extreme heat. 

Anna Steynor, head of climate services at the University of Cape Town’s Climate System Analysis Group, says that, given the “vulnerable development context” of African cities, “any increase in extremes or heat over time is going to have a huge impact, more so than on developed cities.”

The dangers posed by extreme heat in urban Africa have hitherto been widely overlooked, Steynor says; heat officers can play a crucial role in raising awareness. “We’ve seen that champions are incredibly important in driving change,” she says. “Extreme heat is an insidious effect of climate change that people often don’t think about.”

Densely populated and surrounded by water on three sides, Freetown stands to be a challenging stage for heat mitigation efforts. At Kroo Bay, which is gradually expanding towards the sea onto unstable and exposed land, there’s no space for trees to be planted, according to Murray Alie Conteh, councilor for the surrounding Ward 431.

Extreme weather has a number of knock-on effects in slum settlements like his. Crowding and unregulated construction bring higher risks of fire, while poor sanitation increases flood risk and leads to mass mosquito breeding. “It’s getting hotter and hotter,” says Conteh. “At the end of the day, it’s disastrous.”

Adamsy Fornh, a 43-year-old mother of eight who sells home-cooked food, knows that risk as much as anyone. She lived uphill in one of the more established parts of Kroo Bay until 2015, when in the middle of night her home began to burn down. “They just shouted: ‘fire, fire, fire’,” she says. “I left everything behind.”

Now Fornh, who is tending to her newborn grandchild outdoors, lives almost on the water’s edge: The slum has sprawled to a once-uninhabited, marsh-like shore. “We’ve got nowhere else to go,” she says. “We’re pleading for help.”