The city of Phoenix set heat records in summer 2023, with high temperatures that topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) for 31 consecutive days and at least 54 days in total. In such conditions, providing basic services – including cool spaces – for people experiencing homelessness is lifesaving.

In 2022, 420 people – many of them unsheltered – died in Phoenix from heat-related causes. Estimates are not yet available for summer 2023, but given this year’s extreme conditions, the toll is expected to be higher.

For the past two years, we have worked as researchers with the Human Services Campus, a 13-acre complex in Maricopa County, Arizona, where 16 nonprofit organizations work together to help people who are experiencing homelessness. The campus includes Central Arizona Shelter Services, or CASS, Phoenix’s largest homeless emergency shelter, which assists 800 people experiencing homelessness on any given night.

Our work includes talking with staff and clients to better understand their challenges and identify possible solutions that draw from our work in the fields of architecture, health and social innovation.

Dormitories at CASS protect residents from extreme heat with a bunk to sleep in, day rooms for socializing, case management services, and sanitary shower and restroom facilities. But CASS struggles to provide dignified spaces that offer privacy, storage space and quiet environments. People need this kind of environmental support in order to battle recurring physical and mental health issues that often accompany homelessness and can hinder or prevent healing.

Overflowing shelters

As of 2022, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that the U.S. had nearly 600,000 homeless people nationwide, with about 60% living in emergency shelters, safe havens or transitional housing. The other 40% lived outdoors or in places such as abandoned buildings and public transit stations.

Homeless centers must conform to architectural standards for emergency shelter. These standards have historically been influenced by institutional building design, which prioritizes attaining minimum conditions needed to keep people alive. Today, many homeless shelters struggle to provide even that level of care.

The Human Services Campus was originally constructed in 2003 to provide consolidated services and a coordinated entry plan for people experiencing homelessness. However, it was intended to be part of a larger system of shelters, not the sole service provider for Phoenix’s estimated 9,000 homeless people.

The city’s homeless population has grown, in part because of unprecedented rent increases and a lack of affordable housing. During this summer’s heat wave, nearly 1,200 unsheltered homeless people lived on sidewalks surrounding the campus, many in tents, with limited access to bathrooms and sanitation facilities.

Homelessness and mental health

When asked about causes of homelessness, policymakers and members of the public often point to mental illness and addiction, as well as a lack of affordable housing. They tend to pay less attention to the underlying impacts of past trauma other than noting that many women become homeless to escape domestic violence.

In a 2005 study, an alarming 79% of homeless women seeking treatment for mental illness and substance abuse reported experiencing a past traumatic event such as physical or sexual abuse. More recently, a 2020 study showed that nearly two-thirds of homeless women and almost half of homeless men reported that they were homeless because of trauma. Shelter design can affect homeless people’s ability to recover from past trauma and to battle addiction and other mental health issues that perpetuate cycles of homelessness.

For example, one woman who currently lives in CASS told us about trying to get a full night’s sleep while living in a day room where the lights were kept on around the clock and there was constant activity. Because she had several bags of personal items that were too big to store in the dormitory, she could not get a bed there.

“When they don’t turn the lights down at night, I start to feel like my body is vibrating,” she said. “I start to see people walking around, and I’m not sure if they are even really there.”

Routinely sleeping less than seven hours per night can be harmful to health. It lowers immune function, increases chronic pain and raises the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and death. For homeless people battling mental health challenges, addiction and past trauma, rest and recovery are essential to getting back on their feet.

CASS staff have tried to create healthier sleep spaces, such as dorms that remain dark, quiet and cool at all times. Priority access goes to people with jobs. These sections can house only about a third of CASS’s residents, leaving others to sleep in dorms where there is more noise and light.

More supportive spaces

Simply feeding people and providing them with places to sleep is a major challenge for shelters in cities where homelessness is rising. But some have found ways to think more broadly.

In San Diego, Father Joe’s Villages, a nonprofit network with a central campus and scattered-site programs, houses more than 2,000 people nightly. San Diego’s more temperate climate makes it less urgent to maximize the number of people they shelter indoors, so staff at Father Joe’s can use its decentralized design to create shelters with private and quiet spaces.

The Father Joe’s network includes multiple smaller-scale facilities where clean bathrooms are easily accessible and homeless people can use basic amenities like laundry and storage. One example is Mary’s Place, a collection of diverse shelters that provides emergency and long-term support in smaller facilities modeled after the simplicity and comfort of a home.

People experience less stress and can more easily navigate the challenge of ending their own homelessness when they can get a restful night’s sleep in a quiet environment, with spaces that allow them some privacy. We are encouraged to see other U.S. shelters moving in this direction – but there’s a long way to go.

Steps toward better design

To address the lack of privacy at CASS, we have proposed subdividing the day room into more private spaces to accommodate activities like online telehealth appointments, counseling and job interviews. To tackle long-term impacts of overcrowding, we also have recommended introducing sanitation amenities, such as laundry facilities, “hot boxes” to sanitize clothing and bedding, more bathroom facilities and reliable trash removal to reduce the spread of infection and pests such as bedbugs and lice.

For new facilities, designers could consider small changes, such as increased storage and more diligent regulation of temperature, light and noise.

Hospitals, nursing homes and retirement communities have found many ways in recent decades to use design to support patients’ health. Many of the same concepts can be applied to emergency shelters and help turn these facilities from institutional warehouses into spaces of health and opportunity.

Natalie Florence, PhD Candidate in Humanitarian Design and Infrastructure Studies, Arizona State University and Heather Ross, Clinical Associate Professor in Nursing and Clinical Associate Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Earthquakes, large and small, happen every single day along zones that wrap around the world like seams on a baseball. Most don’t bother anybody, so they don’t make the news. But every now and then a catastrophic earthquake hits people somewhere in the world with horrific destruction and immense suffering.

On Sept. 8, 2023, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco shook ancient villages apart, leaving thousands of people dead in the rubble. In February 2023, a large area of Turkey and Syria was devastated by two major earthquakes that hit in close succession.

As a geologist, I study the forces that cause earthquakes. Here’s why some seismic zones are very active while others may be quiet for generations before the stress builds into a catastrophic event.

Earth’s crust crashes into itself and pulls apart

Earthquakes are part of the normal behavior of the Earth. They occur with the movement of the tectonic plates that form the outer layer of the planet.

You can think of the plates as a more or less rigid outer shell that has to shift to allow the Earth to give off its internal heat.

These plates carry the continents and the oceans, and they are continuously in slow-motion crashes with one another. The cold and dense oceanic plates dive under continental plates and back into Earth’s mantle in a process known as subduction. As an oceanic plate sinks, it drags everything behind it and opens a rift somewhere else that is filled by rising hot material from the mantle that then cools. These rifts are long chains of underwater volcanoes, known as mid-ocean ridges.

Earthquakes accompany both subduction and rifting. In fact, that is how the plate boundaries were first discovered.

In the 1950s, when a global seismic network was established to monitor nuclear tests, geophysicists noticed that most earthquakes occur along relatively narrow bands that either fringe the edges of ocean basins, as in the Pacific, or cut right down the middle of basins, as in the Atlantic.

They also noticed that earthquakes along subduction zones are shallow on the oceanic side but get deeper under the continent. If you plot the earthquakes in 3D, they define slablike features that trace the plates sinking into the mantle.

An experiment: How an earthquake works

To understand what happens during an earthquake, put the palms of your hands together and press with some force. You are modeling a plate boundary fault. Each hand is one plate, and the surface of your hands is the fault. Your muscles are the plate tectonic system.

Now, add some forward force to your right hand. You will find that it will eventually jerk forward when the forward force overcomes the friction between your palms. That sudden forward jerk is the earthquake.

Scientists explain earthquakes using what’s known as the elastic rebound theory.

Fast plates move at up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) per year, driven mostly by the oceanic slabs sinking at subduction zones. Over time, they become stuck to each other by friction at the plate boundary. The attempted motion deforms the plate boundary zone elastically, like a loaded spring. At some point, the accumulated elastic energy overcomes the friction and the plate jerks forward, causing an earthquake.

But the plate-driving forces do not stop, so the plate boundary starts to accumulate elastic energy again, which will cause another earthquake – perhaps soon or perhaps far in the future.

In the oceans, plate boundaries are narrow and well defined because the underlying rocks are very stiff. But within the continents, plate boundaries are often broad zones of deformed mountainous terrain crisscrossed by many faults. Those faults may persist for eons, even if the plate boundary becomes inactive. That is why sometimes earthquakes occur far from plate boundaries.

Earthquakes, fast and slow

The cyclic behavior of faults allows seismologists to estimate earthquake risks statistically. Plate boundaries with fast motions, such as the ones along the Pacific rim, accumulate elastic energy rapidly and have the potential for frequent large-magnitude earthquakes.

Slow-moving plate boundary faults take longer to reach a critical state. Along some faults, hundreds or even thousands of years can pass between large earthquakes. This allows time for towns to grow and for people to lose ancestral memory of past earthquakes.

The earthquake in Morocco is an example. Morocco is located on the boundary between the African and the Eurasian plates, which are slowly crashing into each other.

The huge belt of mountains that extends from the Atlas of North Africa to the Pyrenees, Alps and most of the mountains across southern Europe and the Middle East is the product of this plate collision. Yet because these plate motions are slow near Morocco, large earthquakes are not so frequent.

Preparing for the big one

An important fact about catastrophic earthquakes is that, in most cases, the earthquakes don’t kill people – falling buildings do.

Most Americans have heard of California’s San Andreas Fault and the seismic risk to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The last major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault hit at Loma Prieta, in the San Francisco Bay area, in 1989. Its magnitude, 6.9, was comparable to that of the earthquake in Morocco, yet 63 people died compared with thousands. That’s largely because building codes in these earthquake-prone U.S. cities are now designed to keep structures standing when the Earth shakes.

The exceptions are tsunamis, the huge waves generated when an earthquake shifts the seafloor, displacing the water above it. A tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 had horrific consequences, regardless of the quality of engineering in coastal towns.

Unfortunately, earthquake scientists can’t predict exactly when an earthquake might occur; they can only estimate the hazard.

Jaime Toro, Professor of Geology, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Summer 2023 was the hottest on record by a huge margin. Hundreds of millions of people suffered as heat waves cooked Europe, Japan, Texas and the Southwestern U.S. Phoenix hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) for a record 54 days, including a 31-day streak in July. Large parts of Canada were on fire. Lahaina, Hawaii, burned to the ground.

As an atmospheric scientist, I get asked at least once a week if the wild weather we’ve been having is “caused” by climate change. This question reflects a misunderstanding of the difference between weather and climate.

Consider this analogy from the world of sports: Suppose a baseball player is having a great season, and his batting average is twice what it was last year. If he hits a ball out of the park on Tuesday, we don’t ask whether he got that hit because his batting average has risen. His average has gone up because of the hits, not the other way around. Perhaps the Tuesday homer resulted from a fat pitch, or the wind breaking just right, or because he was well rested that day. But if his batting average has doubled since last season, we might reasonably ask if he’s on steroids.

Unprecedented heat and downpours and drought and wildfires aren’t “caused by climate change” – they are climate change.

The rise in frequency and intensity of extreme events is by definition a change in the climate, just as an increase in the frequency of base hits causes a better’s average to rise.

And as in the baseball analogy, we should ask tough questions about the underlying cause. While El Niño is a contributor to 2023’s extreme heat, that warm event has only just begun. The steroids fueling extreme weather are the heat-trapping gases from burning coal, oil and gas for energy around the world.

Nothing ‘normal’ about it

A lot of commentary uses the framing of a “new normal,” as if our climate has undergone a step change to a new state. This is deeply misleading and downplays the danger. The unspoken implication of “new normal” is that the change is past and we can adjust to it as we did to the “old normal.”

Unfortunately, warming won’t stop this year or next. The changes will get worse until we stop putting more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the planet can remove.

The excess carbon dioxide humans have put into the atmosphere raises the temperature – permanently, as far as human history is concerned. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for a long time, so long that the carbon dioxide from a gallon of gasoline I burn today will still be warming the climate in thousands of years.

That warming increases evaporation from the planet’s surface, putting more moisture into the atmosphere to fall as rain and snow. Locally intense rainfall has more water vapor to work with in a warmer world, so big storms drop more rain, causing dangerous floods and mudslides like the ones we saw in Vermont, California, India and other places around the world this year.

By the same token, anybody who’s ever watered the lawn or a garden knows that in hot weather, plants and soils need more water. A hotter world also has more droughts and drying that can lead to wildfires.

So, what can we do about it?

Not every kind of bad weather is associated with burning carbon. There’s scant evidence that hailstorms or tornadoes or blizzards are on the increase, for example. But if summer 2023 shows us anything, it’s that the extremes that are caused by fossil fuels are uncomfortable at best and often dangerous.

Without drastic emission cuts, the direct cost of flooding has been projected to rise to more than US$14 trillion per year by the end of the century and sea-level rise to produce billions of refugees. By one estimate, unmitigated climate change could reduce per capita income by nearly a quarter by the end of the century globally and even more in the Global South if future adaptation is similar to what it’s been in the past. The potential social and political consequences of economic collapse on such a scale are incalculable.

Fortunately, it’s quite clear how to stop making the problem worse: Re-engineer the world economy so that it no longer runs on carbon combustion. This is a big ask, for sure, but there are affordable alternatives.

Clean energy is already cheaper than old-fashioned combustion in most of the world. Solar and wind power are now about half the price of coal- and gas-fired power. New methods for transmitting and storing power and balancing supply and demand to eliminate the need for fossil fuel electricity generation are coming online around the world.

In 2022, taxpayers spent about $7 trillion subsidizing oil and gas purchases and paying for damage they caused. All that money can go to better uses. For example, the International Energy Agency has estimated the world would need to spend about $4 trillion a year by 2030 on clean energy to cut global emissions to net zero by midcentury, considered necessary to keep global warming in check.

Just as the summer of 2023 was among the hottest in thousands of years, 2024 will likely be hotter still. El Niño is strengthening, and this weather phenomenon has a history of heating up the planet. We will probably look back at recent years as among the coolest of the 21st century.

This article was updated Sept. 15, 2023, with NOAA and NASA also confirming summer 2023 the hottest on record.

Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.