Among the new poverties, new especially for Europeans, there are some that in recent years are also coming dangerously close to the old continent, hand in hand with climate change and the related rise in temperatures, especially in summer. Difficulties in access to water, once the privilege of the most deprived populations in the arid areas of the world, are also infecting our southern regions, with the sensational discovery that aqueducts are punctured, reservoirs are untested and rationing, is beginning to affect even cities, as during the worst conflicts.
But it is not only water shortages that worsen the condition of those who already during the year suffer hardships related to insufficient income to ensure easy living conditions. Heat, pure and simple, is also a relevant discriminator between those who can and cannot. With the aggravating factor that then Cooling Poverty, the absence of suitable means to ensure acceptable living temperatures during summer days and nights, takes a heavy toll on all daytime and nighttime activities.
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The concept is best explained to us by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change Foundation: Cooling Poverty can be defined as systemic when it develops in contexts where organizations, households, and individuals are exposed to the damaging effects of increasing heat stress, mainly due to inadequate infrastructure.
A “new” poverty characterized by 5 interacting dimensions:
- Climate
- Thermal comfort of infrastructure and goods
- Social and thermal inequality
- Health
- Education and labor standards
So it is not just a matter of having houses and apartments with decent insulation, such that we can rest without pointing three air conditioners at each other, using the equivalent electricity of a municipality of 20,000 inhabitants. Although this is in fact a decidedly divisive element: those who reside in ultra-insulated buildings with underfloor cooling, ventilated roofs, and triple glazing will probably have a different and hypothetically better quality of life, working and social, than Aler (or similar) tenants who have no way of benefiting from these modern building-architectural innovations.
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It is also about living in neighborhoods where black asphalt is not the prevailing color, where shade exists and trees are not just shrunken simulacra under which dogs perform their irrepressible functions. Then there is a cultural element, shall we say, that would worsen the condition of the “cool poor,” and it is related to the quality of education received and personal knowledge on how to protect oneself from the hazards of the heat. In this case it is actually a rather questionable element: I may be aware of all the heat remedies and ask Alexa every day what the maximum temperatures and humidity levels will be. But if I then have to live in a plasterboard building, with glass as thick as the iPhone's, I don't have half a meter of shade within a 5-kilometer radius, and in the company where I work the average temperature is 31 degrees, all my education on climate change might turn out to be non-resolving.
That then, in the end, in order not to suffer Cooling Poverty, won't it be enough to take a few days off and book on the nearest Heat Island, waiting for summer to end and autumn to lower maximum temperatures by a few degrees?
Illustration by Gloria Dozio - Acrimònia Studios
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