Governing extreme heat: The rise of the chief heat officers in local governments

• In Event: Resilience in Action: Insights into Private and Public Sector Responses to Climate Risks

Abstract

Extreme heat poses a growing threat for reasons including climate change and the urban heat island effect. 2024 was the hottest year globally since record-keeping began in 1850 (U.S. NOAA 2025). Extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States and an increasing health threat to cities worldwide. Compared to other environmental policy and governance issues such as water, energy, food, this area of study is highly under-examined in the public policy and management community. The CHO position has been under the spotlight, both politically and in the media, as cities grapple with rising temperatures and the need for coordinated heat governance. We ask: what are the emerging roles of CHOs and how they are shaping the governance of climate hazards in cities on the frontlines. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with CHOs. We interviewed 9 CHOs globally (10 interviews), which covers 9 out of 11 regions that currently have such role. The interview resulted in about ~150 pages of documents. We performed qualitative thematic analysis using NVIVO 14. The results suggest that CHOs play a critical role in raising awareness of extreme heat hazards and promoting the use of heat mitigation and management tools. While CHO position tends to be inherently cross-cutting, requiring collaboration across multiple departments and disciplines,  we found significant variations between cities in various dimensions of heat governance including governance structure, levels of collaboration internal and external to the organization, political support structure, existing heat resilience capacity. We finally discuss that there is no single governance process and/or structure that works for every city and thus provide general as well as place-based policy suggestions to cities on how to empower and develop heat governance systems to address extreme heat threats.

Author

• Minwoo Ahn, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author