Extreme heat: 'We're really starting now to understand how global climate is impacting our health'

To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: © France 24 05:07 Issued on: 20/08/2026 - 19:53 Annette Young is pleased to welcome Dr. Simon Williams, Behavioural Scientist, WHO Consultant, Lecturer in psychology and a public health researcher at Swansea University. What concerns Dr. Williams most is that the health consequences of extreme heat, particularly for older adults, are emerging sooner and at lower levels of warming than we had previously understood. We are already living with approximately 1.3°C of global warming, and increasingly severe summers are exposing profound age-related vulnerabilities, from reduced physiological capacity to cool the body to underlying cardiovascular and other health conditions. Keywords for this article