Heat is already the deadliest climate hazard in Spain and across the Mediterranean, and the last summers have shown that early-warning systems, while necessary, are no longer enough. The session takes stock of what Spain has learnt from running a national heat-health prevention plan – daily mortality surveillance, local temperature thresholds – and asks what a second generation of heat adaptation looks like: housing and urban design, working conditions, care services and social protection but also emergency preparedness for very extreme heat waves (+50C). A cross-cutting focus on inequality: exposure to heat and the capacity to protect oneself from it are unequally distributed, both within and between countries. Adaptation policy that ignores this gap protects those who are already protected.

OBJECTIVES

• Share Spain’s public-health infrastructure for heat (national prevention plan, daily mortality surveillance, meteosalud zones, vulnerability report) as a transferable model.
• Present new recommendations on heatwave adaptation for highly vulnerable people.
• Move the conversation from emergency response to structural adaptation: building retrofits, urban cooling, labour regulation and health-system preparedness.
• Identify concrete lines of international cooperation on heat adaptation.