Heat Stress
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Special Feature
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Discover CleanTech
Keeping cool As the world is heating up and most modern cooling solutions increase energy usage, Anna Turns investigates alternative methods to combat heat stress. BY ANNA TURNS
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PHOTOS: ISTOCK
Extreme heat has a huge impact on health and wellbeing. Heat stress can result in chronic fatigue and sleep deprivation and loss of learning capacity; food spoils more easily, it is of serious concern for outdoor workers in the construction sector and can threaten wildlife too. On top of this, due to drastic reduction in productivity by the workforce, it has an economic impact. Worryingly, by 2050, ‘record-shattering’ heat waves could become two to seven times more frequent than in the past 30 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in July 2021. Hoping to win the battle with time, scientists and entrepreneurs around the
world are thus hard at work to tackle the heat challenges with tailor-made solutions. Dr Debbie Bartlett studies heat stress at the University of Greenwich, London. She explains that heat stress is actually less about air temperature and more about a standard measure of heat stress known as physiological equivalent temperature, or PET. “If you experience moderately hot weather with high humidity, heat stress will be worse than if you have the same temperature with low humidity – our measures of PET use small mobile weather stations to take lots of factors into account, such as wind speed, sunlight and humidity,”
April 2022
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Issue 02
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51