Chief Job Title

Jane Gilbert was recently appointed as Miami’s first ever Chief Heat Officer.  Until recently, she was the city’s Chief Resilience Officer (that too, the first, I should add).

Excerpts from an interview with The Washington Post:

Q: Why is it important to have someone designated as the chief heat officer?

A: While I was chief resilience officer, we did our own climate adaptation strategy. As part of that, we went out to various neighborhoods sharing maps and data on the impact of sea level rise, storm surge and heat, and then just spent time getting people in small groups talking about what their biggest concerns were. Heat came up a lot.

Q: But heat is such a fact of life in Miami. What makes that deserving of a chief officer?

A: Miami knows heat — we’re hot and humid a good part of the year. A heat index of 105 degrees is about when you’ve hit dangerous levels, when people could really suffer from heatstroke.

We currently have an average of seven days where we get over that heat index for a couple of hours. By mid-century, we’re going to have 88 of those days — that’s more than 10 times as many days.