In the first of our top five episodes from the archives this year, we roll back the clock to the first episode of Climate Conversations where hosts Jack Board and Liling Tan tell you why the heatwave will create bigger problems in future than just wilting plants.
You're listening to AC N A podcast. Hey, guys, the Climate Conversations Team will be taking a break in December, hooray. But we'll, but we'll be back in January 2025. In the meantime, we're bringing back some of the most memorable episodes from this year in case you've missed them. Have a listen and enjoy the holidays. Talk to you next year. Bye for now.
Can you feel that it's summer and this year it feels hotter than ever. Is your air conditioning on right now? Mine is, and for good reason, right across Southeast Asia, sweltering temperatures are taking a toll on our workplaces, our schools, our commutes and the health of our loved ones. Is this the new reality this week? We're battling the heat. Hi and welcome to Climate Conversations.
I'm Jack Boyd, your new host of the podcast. Let me introduce myself. I'm CN A's climate change correspondent and I'm based in Bangkok. I do lots of on the ground reporting all around Southeast Asia and sometimes when I'm lucky beyond and things might be sounding a little bit different as we start a new season of the show.
The format is changing a bit. We're gonna be bringing you closer to the CN A newsroom to the stories that my colleagues in Singapore and all around the region are covering in this space. And you'll be hearing about some of my stories too and the journeying I'm doing to bring this huge and challenging topic to life.
And I'm also excited to tell you about my co-host. She's here. It's Li Ling Tan. She's in Singapore. She's done lots of awesome journalism throughout her career all around the world. Li Ling. Hello. Hi there, Jack and a big hello to everyone joining us on the show. I am executive news editor at Singapore des I cover climate sustainability and the environment
themes that we'll be addressing here on the new climate conversations and yes, there will be doom, there will be gloom, but we'll also be talking about solutions breakthroughs and game changing policies. So all up for discussion.
Very nice to be hosting this with you. I'm gonna start you out by really testing your climate knowledge and the climate knowledge of the listeners as well. We're starting with a climate question. We're gonna do this every week.
Are you ready? Yes, I am. And it's gonna be heat related. What is the hottest temperature ever recorded in Southeast Asia? Where do you think it was? And when do you think it was, I'll give you the length of the podcast to think about your answer. No, it's not in Bangkok today. Although it feels like it might be and we'll see how you go towards the end. Ok. I'll have a think about it.
Let's look at some of the interesting climate environment stories from this week, Lee Ling, you're right there in the newsroom. Take us through what's captured your attention over the past week or so.
Dengue. Dengue danger, Dengue danger alert. We've already topped 5000 cases in just the first three months of the year. And that's in Singapore. It's a bit worrying, you know, not too long ago, we hit a record high of 35,000 Dengue cases. This was back in 2020 we had about 32 people dying from it.
The numbers did go down a little bit before surging again two years ago. And, you know, this is an ongoing battle. It's endemic in Singapore, but it's not just Singapore's battle, Malaysia and Indonesia. They've also seen numbers going up and a big part of this is due to El Nino which causes hotter drier weather as well as the rainy season.
What we're also reading about is part of Singapore's anti Dengue. Arsenal includes the Wolbachia bacteria. You may have heard of this Jack, they inject the mosquito with this Wolbachia bacteria and then they release it into the wild. And what it does is it suppresses Mozzie eggs from hatching.
So it's kind of like a trojan horse. But with mosquitoes and going by the numbers, I think it seems like it's work in progress in an ongoing battle and we know climate change is making these types of diseases worse. Absolutely. Speaking about El Nino, we're looking at rice prices in Indonesia, rice prices have been going up and it continues to hit in
in Asia, especially hot. Now, remember this is a country with the largest population in the region and the highest rice consumption that dwarves any other country here in Southeast Asia. Now, El Nino last year meant longer dry seasons that disrupted production prices have also gone up more than 24%. The lead up to Ramadan
also meant more demand for the staple and that put more pressure on prices. So this really is another sign of how vulnerable food systems in the region are to changes in climate patterns and weather patterns and the need to diversify our food choices and our food sources. Yeah, really tough when rice which is so important is becoming so expensive.
And then finally a more of a novel but kind of a sad story about the Sakura blossoms in Tokyo. Yes, they came late in Tokyo this year. I'm sure a lot of you have heard about this, I think on average it was four days later. But get this, this Jack is an anomaly in an anomalous trend. And what that means is they flowered earlier last year and they also flowered early
in 2021 and then the year before that 2020 as well. And the Japanese Meteorological agency says the average start date has been getting earlier by about 1.2 days every decade. So it's another sign of the impact of the weather system and of course, makes it more difficult. Definitely make sure you planning your
holiday even more difficult. I tried to see the Sakura one year and I was there way too early now. You missed out. When were you there? It was about 10 years ago. I really tried to see the cherry blossoms. No one or you could come to Singapore. I think there's a cherry blossoms thing going on at gardens by the bay right now. Ok. That's always an option. I'll take you there. Let's go.
Now, as promised, we're gonna dig into our main story for this week. It's getting hot in here, right? Things are getting hotter around here. If you're listening right now from anywhere in Southeast Asia, you'll know that the mercury has been soaring recently. Heat is a silent killer. And the scary thing is this could just be the start of longer, hotter days and nights
if temperatures rise by 1.5 °C, the best case scenario under the Paris Agreement, 2.3 billion people could be vulnerable to heat waves with the majority of them in Asia. Three quarters of the entire global population will be exposed to deadly heat conditions every year by 2100 under the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. And that's according to the Asian Development Bank
here in Bangkok right now it's a blistering 37 degrees peak summer. What about you, Lee Ling, I'm sure Singapore isn't much better. Oh, I'm just pulling up the thermometer on my phone. Just give me a second. It is a scorching. It's, oh, wait, it's 30 degrees. But it feels a lot hotter. I came out of home on the way in and I was just drenched. So,
yes, it's hot. It's erratic. Some days it's wet and sticky. Other days it's just absolutely scorching. I'm sunburned or sweaty. My plants are either soggy or crispy. It is miserable, but at least I'm in the newsroom where there's air conditioning most of the day. You're out in the elements though, aren't you Jack? How do you cope?
It's really tough at this time of year being out in the field and carrying around heavy camera equipment. It just makes everything a struggle. But we can hardly complain. We have officers with air conditioning all the time. It's the marginalized people in the community that have no choice. The rice farmers, the grab delivery riders,
the construction workers who really can't escape the heat that I really feel for, especially this time of year and we better get used to it as well. The projections are that it'll get even hotter over the next few decades and by the end of the century, almost every day will be a very hot day. That's based on recent projections out of a Singapore climate change study. And they're saying, compared to now, when we
about 21 very hot days a year come 2099 or 2100, we could get about as many as 351 days of very hot days. In the worst case scenario, we're going to need some real solutions. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think we'll be around but certainly our kids and does the report go into what might happen
in the rest of the region as well? Yes, it does cover the rest of the region and it's projecting around 5.5 to 6 degrees warmer weather in a high emissions or worst case scenario by the end of the century, like you said, our children's lifetime
and their children's lifetime. So it's actually not that far off if you think about it. Actually, we're feeling it but other people in the rest of the parts of the world will be feeling it even worse. It really comes down to the impact it has on people and places. Today, we recently did
a study at CN A Singapore desk about the impact of heat stress on people and industry. Here's an excerpt from the piece by Marcus Tan remo construction work site. He's speaking with Perry Asami Saravanan who is a workplace safety and health officer on duty.
These construction workers are feeling the full effects of the midday sun. It falls to safety and health officers like Saravanan to call his colleagues in for wellness checks and water parades
on a big project like this. There are plenty of opportunities for signs of heat stress to manifest. Saravanan cites physical symptoms like rashes and breathing problems or mental symptoms like confusion,
all of which could lead to accidents happening on the job for drivers or operators and also the worker working under the hot sun. So the rules require higher mental faculties and decision making abilities, construction site or susceptibly to impairment by heat stress.
Six in 10 construction workers survey in the project heat safe studies say they felt fatigued due to heat stress.
Nearly two in five also complained of headaches brought on by prolonged heat exposure.
And so it messes with brain function, screws with decision making and balance which can cause workplace injuries that marketers had touched on that. Now, more bricks to cool off and you know, water breaks. These also disrupt schedules and construction deadlines. So it hits at the bottom line. The study estimates that the impact could cost the country billions of dollars a year in productivity.
So how do we adapt? We turn on our air conditioner. Sometimes it feels like we probably can't live without air con on. I remember speaking to an expert on heat who said that, you know, air conditioning can't be the problem if you keep using it. It's like you're getting fatter, but instead of going on a diet, you just keep buying larger pants. Yeah, it's not sustainable, right? It just makes the problem worse, especially when
you're talking about living in cities in the urban Heat Island effect. Experts are also saying that air conditioning is not the best solution it takes in too much energy spits out too much emissions, very bad for the environment, very bad for cities, very bad for the planet.
So experts are saying we should start to think about acclimatizing to the warmer weather. Stop the air con addiction and dependency or at least dull it back by not setting the thermostat so low. Which kind of makes sense because you know, when you enter malls in Singapore, you're kind of going from scorching heat to like optic freeze in the cold weather in Singapore, which is just ridiculous. I'm a 24 degrees kind of guy with my air con. I think that's not too bad.
But obviously, whenever you have the comfortable temperature inside, you're creating the heat outside. And that energy consumption is a problem. And also one thing we don't think about is it increases the inequalities between communities, people who can afford air con and people who can't. And that's something I see a lot in my daily work. And of course, rising heat is changing the way that we live and we work and we play
and it's not just air conditioning, but how we build and how we design cities. And Singapore obviously is at the forefront of that lot of cities around the world. And when I travel and speak to experts, they're often looking at what Singapore is doing as kind of this prototype model of a hot city trying to get cooler. What have you learned about that Li Ling in Singapore? We're looking at more sustainable district
cooling systems exploring innovative building materials because the built environment is really a big part of this, right? It takes up so much energy to develop and construct. So we are looking also at reflective pain, for example, to keep buildings cool. So there's less pressure to cool it internally. We're planting trees where we can, we've got rooftop gardens. So there's a lot of thought that goes into not just the built in
but the landscaping as well. So that overall there's less energy intensiveness. What about you, Jack? What's Thailand doing to cool down? I think the challenge is much greater than maybe Singapore's experience and we're a little bit further behind but definitely a range of different innovations. They're trying to utilize cool roofs, cooling technologies to minimize this air conditioning demand.
Looking after workers to prevent them from such high levels of heat stress, I know they're trying to do things like green roofs and walls, planting more trees, bringing back mangroves in different parts of the coastal areas near the city, little pocket parks in this. What is a very dense urban landscape. But I mean, if you've been to Bangkok before, you know that the greenery is pretty limited. So a long way to go.
Just one aspect that I think we also maybe underappreciate is there's just a lack of data around which parts of cities are hot, which parts of cities are dangerous for workers or commuters. And I profiled a company in the UAE actually at the end of last year when cop 28 the UN
climate change talks are being held there. And basically they're aiming to become the google of temperature and they want city planners to be able to immediately visualize temperature times locations so that they're able to actually put in solutions and make plans around keeping
cities cooler. So I thought that was pretty interesting if you were able to just search your building or your street in this platform and find out, oh, how hot is it five degrees hotter than the next street? Why is that? Yeah, it would help us make, you know, better decisions about where to go to cool off instead of relying on air conditioning as well.
OK, quiz answer time. A reminder of the question, the hottest temperature ever recorded in South East Asia. Where do you think it was? And when do you think it was? I gotta say it probably was last year, right. Jack around the Asia heat wave, I remember some
staggering numbers 43 degrees I think it was in Laos, 44 in Vietnam, 45 in Bangkok. But I'm not sure if that's the highest on record. It would be really worrying you're spot on there. That last year's heat wave was crazy. And a lot of countries actually broke their all time records. Now, I'm kind of cheating with this answer because it wasn't the real temperature, it was the, feels like temperature and that was 54 °C
in Bangkok last April. And I've just heard recently that we're expecting plus 50 again this summer in Thailand.
And that's gonna lead us into another segment we'll be doing each week, which is the sustainability word of the week, something that we think you might have been hearing in the news and you're wondering what does it mean? And why is it important for me to know about it and sticking with the heat theme this week, the word we've chosen is heat index. So that kind of plays into what I was just talking.
This feels like temperature and you might see it on your phone app when you're checking the temperature that there's a discrepancy between the real temperature and the feels like temperature. So this heat index is also known as the apparent temperature. It's a measure of how hot it feels to the human body when you also take into account air temperature and humidity.
It also then considers how difficult it is for the human body to regulate temperature. So I think that's a useful way to think about temperature and heat impact these days. We don't have to just look at the raw number, but think about actually what that temperature is doing to our body.
Alright. That's all we have for this week. Everyone. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. We have an important favor to ask you
first go and click follow on any major podcast platform like Spotify or Apple. And as we close the episode, we'd like to call out for listeners to send us your questions and we'll answer them each week because we would like your input as part of the climate conversations. And finally, if you've got any feedback, hit us with it too. Our thanks to the CN A podcast team until we chat again next week. I'm Li Ling Tan. I'm Jack Ford.