Asia's first chief heat officer joins all-woman taskforce fighting extreme conditions

Searing heat has forever changed Dhaka, Bushra Afreen tells Louise Boyle. Now, she's leading an effort to tackle the crisis

- Louise Boyle

When she was a child, Bushra Afreen would hear of people leaving her hometown of Dhaka for opportunities to study or work abroad. Now, dangerous, suffocating heat is driving those who can afford it out of Bangladesh's capital city.

"Dhaka is my home but it's not a city that I recognise anymore because of the unbearable heat," Afreen tells The Independent.

"Unlivable - that's the word which commonly gets associated with Dhaka now." Bangladesh experiences some of the highest temperatures in Asia. The monthly average of 30C regularly feels even hotter when combined with the region's high humidity. Dhaka hit 40.6C during a heatwave last month, its highest temperature in six decades. Rising global greenhouse gas emissions, from burning fossil fuels, will continue to make life there even hotter.

Bangladesh is moving "towards an almost permanent state of heat wave", according to a 2021 World Bank report. It's a crisis that Afreen is facing head-on after she was announced as Dhaka's first "chief heat officer" yesterday. She is also the first "CHO" in Asia to join an all-female squad in cities around the world.

"I want to push more engagement and work with all communities but especially those who are really vulnerable," Afreen says.

CHOs are already in place in Miami, Florida; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Athens, Greece; Santiago, Chile; Monterrey, Mexico; and Melbourne, Australia. (Los Angeles also has a CHO after the city took a liking to the idea and decided to fund the position for themselves.) The roles have been created by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Centre, an international think-tank with a goal to make 1 billion people more resilient to extreme heat by 2030. Heat is a silent and insidious killer that claims the lives of more people than any other climate disaster and is particularly dangerous for the elderly, young children, the poor, and those with existing health conditions.