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(Bloomberg) — In Phoenix, heat is a constant challenge: Last year, the city experienced 31 consecutive days of temperatures above 110F (43C). That’s why Phoenix’s Paideia Elementary started buying cooling vests loaded with ice packs for its teachers to wear during  daily dismissal. The school now has more than 30 of them. 

“School starts Aug. 1 when [it’s] over 100F, and that is going all the way through September,” says Brian Winsor, executive director of Paideia Academies, which also includes a 7th-to-12th-grade school.  

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Paideia Elementary’s ice vests are just one example of the adjustments made necessary by a warming world. This year is poised to be the hottest ever, leaving systems, services and infrastructure struggling to function. High temperatures have melted roads, strained power grids and killed thousands. They’re also forcing a rethink of the most quotidian activities, from choosing an outfit to buying groceries or simply falling asleep.

“This is a disaster that we’re all going to have to deal with,” says Maren Mahoney, director of Arizona’s Office of Resiliency.

Whether that means running errands at 6 a.m. or spending Saturdays in a cooling center, individuals and institutions all over the world are finding new heat wave workarounds.

Leaning into early mornings 

From growing up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Daniel Coats knows a thing or two about sweltering heat. The region’s ambient temperature often exceeds 100F (38C) in summer, and Coats’s first line of defense is shifting most of his exercise, errands and other daily activities into early mornings (6 a.m. to 9 a.m.) or evenings (7 p.m. to 9 p.m.), when the heat is less fierce. 

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Living in such a hot environment “completely reshapes your routine,” says Coats, a communications specialist.

He isn’t alone. Globally, individuals and businesses are rethinking their schedules in the face of extreme heat. The National Trust, a charity group that oversees British cultural heritage sites, introduced new working hours to accommodate higher temperatures. Madrid-based waste management firm Urbaser banned street sweeping in temperatures above 39C (102F) and pushed afternoon shifts from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. following the death of a worker during a heat wave in 2022. And with concerns over heat-induced health hazards growing, labor unions in Italy and Greece have also called for new worker protections. 

Staying heat-ready 

When Vivek Shandas knows he’ll be spending a day out in high temperatures, the Portland State University professor — who studies heat — starts preparing 24 hours in advance. “I’m hydrating. I’m avoiding alcohol. I don’t overdo caffeine,” he says. “I don’t eat inflammatory foods, like very heavy foods that I know my body is going to be kind of overheated by.”

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For fieldwork, Shandas dresses in loose clothing that covers up much of his body, and packs a collection of crucial accessories: sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat made from natural fibers, a wet towel, and ice to hold against his wrist and neck. But most important is water. “I always have water in my bag,” Shandas says. “Usually I use a little insulated thermos.”

When working outdoors, Shandas keeps his hands free for the tools he uses to measure temperatures. But for many people, this summer’s hottest accessory is a small portable fan. Google searches for “portable fans” and “neck fans” hit a five-year high, and in June they were briefly among Amazon’s top 30 most-searched terms in the US,  according to e-commerce industry researcher Marketplace Pulse. Popular models, some of which come with a mister, can be handheld, worn around the neck or clipped onto a belt. 

Rethinking the commute  

So far this summer, US commuters have faced canceled trains as tracks buckled under triple-digit temperatures, while soda cans that sat on blistering airport tarmacs exploded on planes. But the most perilous part of traveling in extreme heat can be simply walking to a bus or train stop and waiting for transportation to arrive. 

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“Folks need to think about the last-mile situation, as getting to the transit stop might be where they’re fully sun-exposed,” says V. Kelly Turner, an associate professor of urban planning and geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she studies heat. “The other element that is talked about less is wait times,” since heat waves make transit delays more likely. 

Beyond protective clothing, shade is critical during those last-mile moments — and often overlooked. UCLA research based on mobile phone location data found that people seek out shade more often while walking on the weekends, when their schedules are more flexible, but tend to stick to their usual path on weekdays. Turner notes that standing in the shade can change the way your body experiences heat by as much as 54F to 72F (30C to 40C). 

Some cities share maps online that can help people find the coolest route from one place to another. Turner says urban planners also need to consider shade in heat adaptation strategies. “While there are many communities that are thinking about tree planting, I don’t think they’re thinking about how much shadow is being cast as the primary important thing that they need to be providing to pedestrians and transit riders,” she says. 

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Honing hydration

When working in the heat, a good rule of thumb is to drink one cup of water every 20 minutes. But as rising temperatures up the ante on hydration needs, wearable sweat monitors are becoming an increasingly helpful tool for outdoor workers. 

Roozbeh Ghaffari sees that demand firsthand. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Epicore Biosystems, which Ghaffari co-founded in 2018, sells reusable wearable patches that measure their users’ eccrine sweat and offer real-time recommendations on liquid and electrolyte intake. If someone wearing an Epicore patch is close to dehydration, they receive a smartphone alert. The company says it has supplied more than 5,000 patches to 30 companies.

Companies are finding Epicore’s data helpful, too. Findings have been used to inform the number of drinking fountains a construction firm will need on site, for example. 

Spending time in a cooling center 

As heat gets more extreme, having a place to cool down becomes critical. That’s why, whenever temperatures cross 95F (35C), Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Recreation Center transforms into one of the city’s 100-plus cooling centers. 

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“We have what’s called a porch party,” says Thennie Freeman, director of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. When the cooling center is activated, the department often sets up a tent outside and provides “snow cones and water and popcorn as people are walking by,” Freeman says. Inside, people sit around tables in the air-conditioned front room, and have access to water fountains and restrooms equipped with laundry machines. 

Many cities are embracing cooling centers, though approaches vary. The centers can be existing public spaces such as libraries, or private spaces that open to the public. They can have AC, fans or just water. They can be open all summer or only during heat waves. They can serve everyone or cater to specific groups such as seniors.

Getting people to show up isn’t always easy, but Freeman says foot traffic at the Kennedy Recreation Center is high. “It’s families. It’s our vulnerable population. We’re seeing our unhoused residents who come in and sit. We see a lot of tourists,” she says. They also see a lot of latchkey kids who would otherwise head home alone after school. “On busy hot days, [we’re] trying to keep them engaged in somewhere safe and fun,” Freeman says. 

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Giving in to air conditioning 

Arbi Shakhgiriev has been in the air conditioning business for six years, but it wasn’t until 2023 that he struck out on his own, starting installer Airconcool out of London. The record-hot year gave Shakhgiriev an inkling of future demand for his services. 

“I think I’m entering a perfect time,” he says. “If I start now, then 10 years down the line when it gets very popular, I’ve already established myself.” This summer, Airconcool’s Google advertising has gotten three times more clicks than it did in March or April. 

Globally, the residential AC market grew by almost 10% in 2023. Sales are growing the fastest in the Middle East, and in rapidly-developing parts of Asia like India. In the UK, less than 5% of homes had AC between 2013 and 2019, but that number is also on the rise, says Sarah Atkinson, head of marketing and product development at Mitsubishi Corp. “We saw a marked increase from Covid onwards,” as people spent more time at home, she says.

Poor building design is also a factor. When Yin Wu moved to the UK from Hong Kong in 2001, he left a land of humid summers and ample AC for a markedly milder climate. But just three years later he found himself buying a portable air-conditioning unit. In Wu’s home, a new-build south-facing apartment in east London, “all my windows face one side. So even if it’s nice and windy and breezy outside, it just is impossible to cool the flat down.” 

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In 2020, Wu’s family installed a water-cooled integrated AC system at a cost of about £8,000 ($10,300). He says it’s been a game-changer: “It’ll cool the room down within three or four minutes.”

Handling ‘heat days’ at school

When Paul Chinowksy, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, led a study of heat-related school closures in the US in 2021, he found that they had doubled over the preceding decade. Now those figures have tripled, Chinowsky says, to eight days per year on average. Heat has also prompted school closures in the Philippines and South Sudan, among other countries. 

There are two major issues at play. The first is that high temperatures are especially dangerous for kids, who heat up three to five times faster than adults. “Children aren’t just small adult bodies. They’re differently threatened by extreme heat,” says Sara Ross, co-founder of the educational nonprofit UndauntedK12. Studies also show that extreme heat is associated with increased bullying and worse academic performance. 

The other issue is air conditioning, which even in AC-heavy America isn’t guaranteed. Around 14,000 US schools are in need of new HVAC systems, according to a recent White House report. At colleges and universities, many student dormitories also lack AC. 

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“We used to design schools in the Northeast in a way to retain heat,” says Joe Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard University. “We designed schools for a different climate than this.”

At the start of the 2023 academic year, Juliette Deley, an environmental engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, started a petition for the university to provide AC for all dorms. Last August and September, she says students were sleeping anywhere but their own rooms to escape the heat, including hotel rooms and even air-conditioned lobbies.

Losing sleep

While daytime temperatures get the most attention, hotter nights bring their own hazards. “Tropical nights,” when the temperature doesn’t drop below 68F (20C), make it harder for the body to recover from heat, and can contribute to sleep deprivation. 

In the UK, building standards say overnight temperatures shouldn’t exceed 26C (79F) in bedrooms for more than 1% of annual hours. But that’s based on a study from the 1970s, says Arash Beizaee, a senior lecturer in building energy at Loughborough University. 

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To improve our understanding of the heat/sleep relationship, Loughborough last year launched a “Sleep in the City” project to monitor the summer sleep patterns of more than 100 people in East London. The goal is to determine the point at which high temperatures make it hard for people to fall asleep, stay asleep and access deep sleep (the kind that lets you wake up feeling refreshed).

Similar studies have been done in South Korea, China and Germany, but every country sleeps differently. The micro-climate of the bed — what bedclothes are used, what people wear to sleep, whether they have air conditioning or keep their windows open — is an essential part of determining what temperature is tolerable. 

Check out more Heat Week coverage:

• Experts Are Fighting Over Naming Heat Waves

• A $91 Billion Trade Keeps Miners Digging in Record Desert Heat

• Operating the Perfect Cooling Center Is Harder Than It Looks

• No One Knows How Many People Are Dying From Heat

• Record Heat Is Testing Kraft Heinz’s Climate-Proof Ketchup

Listen on Zero: What Extreme Heat Means for Your Health

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