Heat Action Day 2025: As heatwaves intensify, knowledge saves lives
By the IFRC
(A version of this story appeared first on the IFRC website earlier today; it has been edited here for length. The new flagship report was also published to coincide with Heat Action Day 2025.)
As climate change creates supercharged heatwaves that are claiming more lives. This year, Heat Action Day’s #BeatTheHeat message focuses on recognizing the signs of heat exhaustion and heatstroke and how to cool down and stay safe.
Heatwaves are often referred to as silent killers because while they often claim many lives they do so one at a time in many separate places: at a workplace, in a stifling apartment or on a scorching city sidewalk.
But as climate change pushes average temperatures higher, it is also leading to more frequent extreme-heat events. What was once “a few hot days” now stretches into weeks-long spells that define entire summers and lead to thousands of deaths due to heat exhaustion, heatstroke and dehydration.
Unfortunately, many people don’t recognize the warning signs until it’s too late or they don’t know how to respond quickly and effectively once the signs are clear: here is advice from the IFRC Global First Aid Centre.
Launched by the IFRC in 2022 and led by National Societies and partners, global Heat Action Day mobilizes cities, communities, and organizations to take simple life-saving steps to protect people from heat-related illnesses.
For heat exhaustion, it’s important to know what heat does to your body. Heat exhaustion occurs when your body overheats and can’t cool itself down: heavy sweating; cool, pale clammy skin; dizziness or fainting; rapid, weak pulse; nausea or headache.
What to do? Take a cool shower or use cold compresses; get to a cooler place; drink water if fully conscious.
‘Every nudge in global warming increases the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves’
Heat exhaustion can progress to life-threatening heatstroke: confusion or disorientation; no sweating despite hot conditions; fainting or seizures.
What to do? Call for medical help immediately; move the person to a cool place; cool them with water or ice packs, and stay with them until help arrives; drink water if fully conscious.
The IFRC is also using the occasion of Heat Action Day to release a new report, Heat through the eyes of the most vulnerable: perceptions and pathways to action, to highlight how rising global temperatures are making heatwaves more frequent and intense.
In the year to this month, 4 billion people experienced at least an additional month’s worth of extreme heat due to human-caused climate change.
*In Central Asia, an extraordinary heatwave in March was up to 10°C hotter due to climate change.
*The United Arab Emirates experienced its hottest May on record.
*Schools were closed in South Sudan for two weeks in March due to a heatwave.
*In 2024 a heatwave in the Sahel led to maximum temperatures over 45°C across the region, including a record of 48.5C in Kayes, Mali on 3 April.
“Every nudge up in global warming increases the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves,” Jagan Chapagain, Secretary General, IFRC said in his introduction to the report. “This has devastating consequences, ranging from physical and mental health impacts to disruptions to critical systems – and even heightened conflict.
“Despite its deadly and wide-reaching impacts, heat remains under-recognized in policy, under-prioritized in adaptation planning and under-resourced in local implementation.
“Heat disrupts health, weakens social systems, and triggers cascading failures in water, food, electrical and transport infrastructure,” he added.
“Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers see the effects of heat first-hand: from newborns and elderly people showing up more often in healthcare settings, to changes in community life as people use public spaces less and adjust their lives around the hottest times of day.
“Financial, social and systemic barriers prevent people from taking protective action. For example, outdoor workers who are generally young and healthy must make impossible choices between their health and making a daily wage.”
Among other things, the report recommends that national and local authorities and communities develop heat action plans and train volunteers to do first aid for heat and more critical, life-saving actions.
National Societies around the world and other stakeholders are joining in with a wide range of heat action initiatives and events.
Red Cross volunteers in Burkina Faso go from village to village, house to house and even field to field to visit people who tend crops in the sun, ensuring they know how to protect themselves during heatwaves. (Photo: Burkinabe Red Cross Society)