Many parts of the country are currently locked in a deep cold snap. Pipes are freezing, heating bills are climbing, and emergency crews are focused—rightly—on winter risks. But this stretch of bitter cold also marks the most important time to prepare for a very different threat—extreme heat.
Heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, claiming more lives than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. The real toll is even higher, since heat often worsens heart and lung conditions rarely recorded as “heat-related” on death certificates. Yet the most consequential decisions about heat—how cities are built, how homes are upgraded and how health departments prepare—need to be made when temperatures are falling, not rising.
Nationally, more than 70,000 emergency-room visits and 10,000 hospitalizations occur every year due to heat illness—nearly all preventable. And Black and Hispanic Americans bear a disproportionate share of heat-related deaths, reflecting long-standing inequities in housing, infrastructure and working conditions.
Every fall, attention to heat fades with the temperature. Public budgets shift, emergency plans wind down and research funding gets reallocated. And over the past year, the Trump Administration has proposed and implemented several billion dollars of cuts to science funding, affecting research programs in climate, environment, health, and other areas.
The 2026 budget proposal continues that trend, including double-digit cuts to the National Science Foundation, NIH and NASA. Those reductions would not just affect academic projects—they would weaken early-warning systems, heat-risk forecasting and research that guides cities on where to plant trees or open cooling centers. As public-health experts often note, you can’t manage what you don’t measure—and cutting data and research capacity means flying blind into the next crisis.
Despite shrinking budgets, many cities are experimenting with practical, low-cost ways to stay cooler:
These projects share a mindset shift: treating cooling as shared infrastructure, not just a household luxury. Trees, reflective materials and shade may sound modest, but they save energy, reduce peak electricity demand and protect health far more sustainably than emergency air-conditioning drives in midsummer.
But many other cities that want to act may be prevented from doing so. State preemption laws in places like Florida and Texas restrict local governments’ ability to strengthen building codes, require shade or water breaks for outdoor workers or regulate energy costs during extreme heat.
Here are a few steps communities and cities can take now:
- Plan cooling infrastructure like snow removal. Cities that prepare for heat year-round—budgeting maintenance, mapping vulnerable neighborhoods and coordinating transportation and health agencies—suffer fewer emergencies and smaller death tolls.
- Retrofit homes before temperatures rise. Adding insulation, sealing leaks, and installing efficient air-conditioning can lower both heat risk and winter utility bills. Programs that subsidize these upgrades deliver long-term returns on par with storm-hardening or flood prevention.
- Preserve scientific capacity. When funding for weather and health data dries up, communities lose the evidence needed to act. Investments in data and research are not abstract—they determine how well we forecast danger and whom we reach first.
- Think equity first. Extreme heat is not just a meteorological event; it’s a mirror of social conditions. The same neighborhoods that flood first also overheat fastest. Addressing heat means addressing inequity.
The challenge of extreme heat isn’t that it arrives suddenly—it’s that we treat it as seasonal. If officials want to save lives next July, they have to act now. As climate patterns shift, the smartest strategy is also the least intuitive: prepare for heat when it’s cold outside. Because the deadliest heatwaves begin long before summer.
