Heatwaves in Europe and North America make global headlines but at the same time the Sahel’s rising mercury barely registers.
Heat mortality in the Global North is tracked through excess-death studies and research. But in the Global South — where the crisis is most acute across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and South East Asia — record-keeping is incomplete, research methods were built for high-income settings and the tools to measure and respond are the very thing that is missing.
Follow our WhatsApp channel for insights on how the power, energy and water sectors are evolving
Chilling Prospects
SEforAll has published reports on global cooling access since 2018. Their 2026 Special Edition of Chilling Prospects examines heat-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
From the archives: Chilling prospects for over 1bn people at risk from lack of cooling access
Using poverty and electricity access as a stand-in for cooling affordability, SEforAll estimates than more than a billion rural and urban poor worldwide are at high risk of lacking cooling access.
Around 60% of Africa’s population lacks a heat early warning system which is a critical gap that leaves people exposed to illness, death, lost income, spoiled food and unreliable medicine and vaccine access.
The report explains why measuring heat mortality matters, where measurement falls short, and lists heat adaptation, cooling access and energy access as the most direct levers for risk reduction. It concludes that better evidence, research collaboration and heat action grounded in the communities affected, are what’s needed.
Changing the thinking around heat and cooling
Reducing heat mortality requires a layered response. SEforAll suggests treating heat not as an emergency, but as a recurring, predictable risk to anticipate and finance in advance. It also insists that this has to be buttressed by political will pulling in the same direction at every level: grassroots, local government, national policy and international financing.
Poverty alleviation, social safety nets and energy access underpin all of this effort. Without reliable electricity, secure housing, income or a safety net when heat strikes, every tier of the cooling hierarchy becomes that much harder to reach or sustain.
But, at the moment the Global South treats heat as if it is an exception event instead of a seasonal certainty. Changing that thinking, and the financing that follows, is where the work has to start.
Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with smart technology solution advances
Passive and nature-based cooling
Architectural shading, cross-ventilation, thermally massive materials, reflective surfaces, urban tree canopies, and green spaces and cooling centres all reduce the load mechanical cooling must manage. This eases demand on fragile grids, and cuts costs that make cool so unaffordable for many.
“Passive solutions are most effective when they meet the needs of their communities by drawing on indigenous and vernacular building traditions that encode generations of knowledge about thermal comfort in specific climates.”
Traditional examples include:
- windcatchers using cross-ventilation — malqaf in Egypt, bâdgir in Iran;
- jaali (perforated screens) in India that ventilate interior spaces; and
- mashrabiya in the Middle East — wooden window lattices cooled by air passing over clay pots of water or damp straw.
Also common are internal courtyards, thick thermal-mass walls, shading screens and evaporative water pools.
Have you read? Ten cooling trends gaining currency around Africa
Electricity access
The next layer in the cooling cake is electricity access: where passive measures need supplementing, fans and evaporative coolers are the next affordable step for most of the Global South.
Beyond a critical threshold of heat and humidity, air conditioning (AC) becomes very necessary for human survival. But the countries facing the largest rise in heat mortality by 2050 have the lowest projected AC ownership and weakest electricity infrastructure.
Closing the energy access gap isn’t just about fans and AC — it drives income growth, social resilience and poverty alleviation, making every tier of the cooling hierarchy more accessible.
A household with reliable electricity can pursue productive uses of energy, grow its income, retrofit a roof, buy a fan, or receive a heat warning that an unconnected household might miss.
Acting on information
Identifying who is at risk doesn’t have to wait for better mortality data. “Heat vulnerability assessments, combining data on exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, can direct cooling investments, target welfare outreach and guide urban policy even when mortality data are absent.”
Some existing tools could do more. Verbal autopsy instruments (the primary means of capturing mortality data where registration is absent) are not designed to capture heat as a factor. But this is fixable.
Of reference: Sub-Saharan Africa: Growing crisis in sustainable cooling access
As SEforAll notes: “The heat mortality evidence base has also been built largely at high-income institutions and expanding it required sustained investment in regional research networks and in-country epidemiological capacity, generating evidence grounded in the climates, disease burdens, and social conditions of the populations most affected.”
Better evidence means better action. Strong registration systems generate data for attribution, and finer attribution guides intervention choices more precisely: “Understanding not just that heat kills, but which combinations of factors drive mortality in a given population, whether that is unreliable electricity, inadequate housing, social isolation or occupational exposure, makes it possible to identify which interventions will have the greatest impact in that specific context.”
Better evidence doesn’t just show where the problem is, it shows us what to do about it. The goal here cannot just be to measure data points. It must be to make sure that the people who are most exposed to heat — in cities warming faster than the global average, without reliable electricity, in inadequate housing — are visible enough to be reached. And then that the interventions most likely to help them arrive fast enough to matter.
Check the SEforAll website for the Global Cooling Access dashboard
Read more on the Special Edition of Chilling Prospects
