
Heat researchers at Duke University will spend the next two years developing an interactive, web-based tool to help policymakers plan for extreme heat, especially in rural and coastal communities.
The U.S. Department of Commerce and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced earlier this month that $500,000 was awarded to the university’s Heat Policy Innovation Hub on the campus in Durham.
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“Over the last 30 years, heat exposure has killed more people in the United States than any other weather-related phenomenon. The combined economic impacts of labor loss, hospital visits, and reduced agricultural yield — along with the health impacts of exposure — make heat among the most significant consequences of climate change for humanity,” according to the hub.
Funded through the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act signed in 2022, the hub is partnering on the project with the National Integrated Heat Health Information System, or NIHHIS. Under NOAA’s climate office, the system is a collaboration of 25 federal entities working to reduce heat impacts across the country.
“The economies of rural communities often rely on agriculture and other outdoor industries, while coastal communities exposed to high humidity tend to rely on hospitality, tourism and recreation,” hub Director Ashley Ward said in a release. “Extreme heat poses health and economic hazards in both types of communities, but the risks are different and require targeted solutions.”
Ward said in an interview that while there’s been a lot of research on how heat affects human health, there has been much less work on how it affects the economy.
“We have been so focused, and for good reason, on the health impacts of heat,” but heat’s impact on the economy is “going to have much bigger consequences than we’ve appreciated so far,” she said.
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The World Economic Forum for the first time released in December its assessment of what climate change will mean for businesses globally. The report, Business on the Edge, predicts a 70% global loss in fixed assets from heat over the next decade.
That’s hundreds of billions of dollars, Ward said.
“They determined that most of that loss will occur in the communication sector and the utilities, and it will happen because of labor laws, labor productivity loss, and damage to hard infrastructure,” she said. “Personally, I think that we have not even begun to understand the catastrophic economic impact that heat will bring in the next 10 to 20 years.”
Ward explained the innovation hub is “very early” in the planning process and that researchers are thinking about what the web-based tool will look like.
The tool’s interactive map is expected to focus on localized heat impacts, offer guidance on developing heat policies, assess heat risks in rural and coastal communities, and facilitate private sector collaboration. The research team plans to work with policymakers to ensure the tool meets their needs.
“A good chunk of this work is going to be quantifying and looking at what the economic impacts of heat will be across six sectors, which are agriculture, transportation, health, energy, housing and labor,” she said.
While researchers won’t be able to cover the entire scope of heat-related impacts in this two-year period, the plan is to establish “the foundation for some really innovative work on pushing people to think about heat differently,” she added.
Ward said the researchers plan to take an in-depth look at extreme heat in rural and coastal communities.
A lot of research has been done on how heat impacts urban places, but “we have growing and greater vulnerability in rural areas, with fewer tools in the toolbox to address it,” she said.
In North Carolina, heat-related illness rates in rural areas are many times greater than in urban areas, and most of the solutions, like cooling centers or tree planting campaigns, don’t really translate into rural environments very well.
The same can be applies to coastal areas that are “plagued by some of the same challenges that rural communities are plagued with — real threats to their livelihoods — but also challenges with solutions,” she said. “We’re seeing a combination of increasing temperatures also destroying some of the economic backbone of coastal communities.”
Oyster farms, for example, are highly vulnerable, with some U.S. shellfish growers reporting 100% crop losses in the last couple of years, Ward added.

Ward’s work on extreme heat can be traced back to her days with NOAA, where she focused on the impacts of climate extremes in the coastal plains of the Carolinas.
In 2015, she was sent into coastal communities to talk to residents about issues of which they were particularly concerned.
“I thought that we would be talking about hurricanes. But when we showed up, a lot of the community partners basically said, we know a lot about hurricanes, we don’t know a lot about heat, and heat is really starting to show up in our communities. It was really the communities that started my interest and work in that topic,” Ward said.
When she arrived at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability in 2019, Ward said she noticed that researchers had done great work in identifying populations that are vulnerable to extreme heat and communities have responded by thinking about ways to mitigate the impacts of rising temperatures.
But, she said, those conversations were not being carried over to policymakers.
The heat hub was launched in 2023, “with the mission of bringing together a real cross-sector collaboration to try and think about ways to address heat and inform better policy, and sometimes that policy is public policy, but sometimes it’s also thinking about industry and the role that they play,” Ward said.
The hub’s researchers have worked with the state to develop a heat alert system and helped with county-level heat action plans. Last June, the hub held the HeatWise Policy Partnership Summit.
The hub is currently working with faith-based leaders in the Carolinas, exploring private sector and community-based solutions for heat and energy affordability. The hub is also working with the United Nations to develop a heat management system and is assessing readiness among UN agencies to deal with heat globally.