Summer is often pleasant in Missoula, but we’re also experiencing much hotter days and warmer nights, thanks to climate change.  How can we best take precautions and look out for each other, our kids, our neighbors and even our pets? There’s much we can do to understand the risks, adjust our activities, and keep cool.

Check out our smart 2 minute video (right).

When it's hot, drink plenty of water, curtail exercise, seek shade, never leave kids or pets in the car, and check in on your neighbors, especially older adults.

To address extreme heat, we need to plan and build a future better suited for hot summers, with cool places to go, abundant shade, comfortable homes, and lots and lots of water.  We can learn so much from what other communities are doing - check out a new resource via Climate Ready Missoula HERE. 

​For more about the science and changing summers, click HERE.

VIDEO: How to "Weather" the Summer Heat

If the above film does not load automatically, download here. Worth it!

Explore our Summer Smart heat resources:

Health Risks + What You Can Do

cooling buildings + neighborhoods

building + growing shade

2022 - good reads and resources:
​

• Rural Residents May Not Be Ready for Increasingly Intense Heat Waves: Montana Public Radio
• NIHCM Foundation: Climate Changes Health: Extreme Heat, interactive infographic
• The US Govt has a new integrated heat health website: HEAT.GOV
• GRIST: As a heat wave grips the US, lessons from the hottest city in America
• CDC: excellent extreme heat guidelines  

2021 - we recommend these:
​

• CLIMATE ONE podcast: Extreme Heat the Silent Killer
• Climate Signals: Climate Change and Heat Waves
• New York Times: One Third of heat deaths related to climate change 
• GRIST: Heat waves can be life-threatening - for more reasons than one
• NPR: How to stay safe and cool in extreme heat

---

Help create cooler homes for all Missoulians! 

We need to improve sub-standard housing, build more affordable housing, and improve the efficiency of all our buildings.

And of course, join in the effort to find climate solutions from the local to the global scale. We can adapt only so much to a warming world.

Learn more about our collaborative Building(s) for the Future work. 

building(s) for the future effort

Additional Resources:
How Urban Heat Islands threaten public health from Grist
Half the world could see deadly heat waves by 2100 from Climate Central
​Heat Wave Risk Perception from the Yale Climate Change Communication. Feb 2017. 
Heat Risk from the National Weather Service.
Heat Island Community Actions Database, from the EPA. We'll see how long this link works...

---