This year, Las Vegas, Nevada broke its all-time heat record, reaching 120° F.

The temperature was recorded at Harry Reid International Airport on July 7, 2024. That week, between July 6 and July 12, was the new hottest 7-day period on record, with an average high temperature of 117.5° F.

This is the daily reality for Vegas residents in the summer. Record-breaking temperatures are hard to bear, but so were all the hot days and nights that came before. Commuters frequently see temperatures above 120 flash on their vehicle dashboards, and outdoor workers struggle to do their daily tasks under the hot sun.

“There’s a disconnect between climate science and the people who live here,” says Woodwell Climate Research Associate, Monica Caparas. “Vegas residents know our summers are hot and unbearable. Understanding climate change is driving the extreme weather we’re experiencing is where the disconnect lies. ”

Caparas moved to Las Vegas as a child. She grew up there, left for college, and returned to settle into her adult life. Today, she works for Woodwell Climate’s Risk team remotely from her home in the city. Caparas knows the ins and outs of local life. These include Vegas’s rapid population expansion, the groups of people experiencing homelessness sheltering in underground stormwater infrastructure, and the heat that was unbearable before it started making headlines.

Experiencing climate change without shelter

Caparas’s work with the Risk team aims to provide communities like Las Vegas with an accurate picture of the climate-driven changes in their future. These “risk assessments” are provided through Woodwell Climate’s Just Access program, which uses the most accurate climate models, in collaboration with local knowledge, to anticipate future community safety threats. The analyses have brought to light growing threats from flooding, heat, storms, and more. The team provides assessments, free of charge, to states, cities, and countries across the world.

Just Access serves what Risk Program Director Christopher Schwalm calls “frontline communities.” The term describes groups of people who are over-exposed, under-resourced, underserved, historically marginalized, and therefore the most at-risk to the repercussions of climate change. In the risk assessment for Las Vegas, people experiencing homelessness are front and center.

“Between May 20th and the first week in July, about 20 people who were experiencing homelessness died of heat,” says Dr. Catrina Grigsby-Thedford, Executive Director of the Nevada Homeless Alliance (NHA) and community partner in Las Vegas.

The NHA estimates that almost 8,000 people are experiencing homelessness on any given night in southern Nevada. The number is only growing. Grigsby-Thedford says that this year’s unhoused population is up 1,300 people compared to 2023.

“Often our shelters are full,” Grigsby-Thedford says, “We’re limited by shelter beds and space.”

The NHA’s shelters do open all day in extreme heat, but so many people packed tightly together is still unsafe.

With nowhere to go, some seek shelter underground in Las Vegas’s stormwater infrastructure. While the tunnels are cooler out of the sun’s reach, they are at risk from flooding. Across the region, extreme precipitation is expected to increase by 12-14% by 2050, raising flood risk in the city and especially within the tunnels.

To combat lack of space and shelter, the NHA hosts 4-8 one-stop resource fairs per month. The events, called Project Homeless Connect, serve both people experiencing homelessness and low-income residents in Las Vegas. Grigsby-Thedford says these events “fill in gaps”—offering housing assistance, medical care, hygiene care, and other resources.

Despite all of this work, many unhoused people are hesitant to engage with organizations like the NHA. Grigsby-Thedford says “choice is often a challenge,” and that when people grow accustomed to the way things are, they often accept it and choose to stay.

Picturing risk

Building trust with communities, especially those predisposed to mistrust outside actors, is essential in this work. Which is why, Schwalm says, Woodwell Climate approaches risk work with the goal of “meet[ing] people where they are.”

That means “scoping,” the team’s word for listening to what community and government leaders want out of the risk analysis—what concerns they have, weak points they’ve identified, and what help might be needed post-analysis.

“Two-thirds of the time we spend from start to finish falls into this scoping idea, rather than doing analysis itself,” Schwalm says.

Scoping frames the data the risk team collects, as well as who their partners will be during the risk analysis process.

“We find people who are practical and recognize that there’s a problem,” Schwalm says, “We only work with communities who want to work with us.”

Following the scoping process, the Risk team compiles an analysis of extreme weather events and subsequent risks each community will face as climate change progresses.

“We perform a stress test of that particular geography to identify weak points,” Schwalm explains.

Then, the Risk team uses the most up-to-date climate models possible to predict changes in extreme weather and regional climate. By using predictive models, the team focuses efforts on what the future will hold, as opposed to using past strategies.

“We need to use the future to predict the future,” Schwalm says simply.

Making climate risk data accessible to all

Over the past three years, Just Access has provided 50 communities—that’s about a quarter billion people—with risk analyses. These communities span the U.S., Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. They’ve worked with countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they helped update the country’s National Adaptive Plan, states like Chiapas in Mexico, groups like Cree Nation in Canada, and other communities, now including Las Vegas.

Despite all of this work, though, Schwalm says there is still room to grow.

“Fifty communities is kind of only a drop in the bucket,” he says, “We’re not going to make a huge dent in this unless we move beyond working community-by-community.”

Two major roadblocks for Just Access are finite resources: time and money. Individual risk analyses require a lot of time and communication to address risks in relatively small areas.

The other obstacle, money, is something climate research could always use more of. Grants and donations are crucial in order for analyses to remain free, and those sometimes come with limitations.

“There’s a tension from the funder to work in a specific geography sometimes,” Schwalm says, “It’s a juggling act.”

Climate change can also be a politicized topic. In order to meet people where they are, sometimes the Risk team implements changes in language used to communicate with community leaders. This can be a change as simple as using “extreme weather” instead of “climate change.” As long as everyone in the room is ready to confront what the future holds, they’re all working on the same page towards the same goal.

“We’ve done red states, blue states, rural, urban,” Schwalm continues. “We’ve learned how to read the room.”

Creating the foundations for change

Woodwell Climate’s involvement in Las Vegas brings to light the way justice issues, like homelessness, interact with growing threats from climate change.

“In the Las Vegas risk assessment, we are focusing on the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on communities already facing systemic socio-economic inequity,” says Caparas. “We must think about intersectionality in order to address climate justice.”

Not only does climate change represent a current crisis for those experiencing homelessness, communities with fewer resources are now at greater risk of being made homeless by future climate-related disasters. Accurate climate risk information can support organizations like NHA as they develop strategies to serve people experiencing homelessness in a more extreme future.

Grigsby-Thedford says that NHA members, especially those with lived experience of homelessness who work as Lived X Consultants, are always looking to be involved in projects like the one Caparas leads.

“We always talk about weather in our meetings,” she says, “So this is perfect, someone’s actually doing research about this. Anything that impacts [Las Vegas’s homeless population], we want to make sure we’re involved in that.”

For the Las Vegas risk assessment, Caparas is working with the NHA and Southern Nevada Lived X Consultants to understand climate risks around cooling stations in public buildings, which are a vital, air-conditioned shelter when the heat index is too high. Grigsby-Thedford says there were many more cooling stations in 2023 and 2024 compared to previous years.

Caparas also forged a connection with Miguel Dávila Uzcátegui, Southern Nevada’s Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) Senior Planner and board member of Help Hope Home. Together, they are developing a database of flooding infrastructure and updating the city’s flooding model with future climate projections. The RTC will integrate the Risk team’s model into regional planning work, updating Las Vegas’s flooding and transportation infrastructure for community safety.

None of this work would have been possible without Caparas’s diligent bridge building between the scientific resources of Woodwell Climate and the needs of people in her own community. Those connections allow science to be informed first and foremost by those most affected by climate change.

“The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution,” says Grigsby-Thedford.

It’s already official: You’re living through the hottest year on record

According to the European Union’s climate agency, 2024 is also the first year to breach a key climate threshold.

Nine months ago, the oceans became bathwater. As historically hot sea temperatures forced corals to expel the microorganisms that keep them alive, the world endured its fourth mass coral bleaching event, affecting more than half of all coral reefs in dozens of countries. As the temperatures continued to climb, many died.

It was an early taste of what would become a year marked by the consequences of record-breaking heat. And now it’s official: Last week, when much of the world’s attention was turned to the U.S. presidential election, scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service crowned 2024 as the hottest year on record — and the first year to surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark. And that’s with two months left to go in the year.

What is COP?

Formally, the COP is the decision-making platform for signatories of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC is a legally binding agreement between UN member countries, created specifically to tackle the crisis of climate change. Each year since its creation, delegations from participating countries (called Parties) have met at the COP to discuss the agreements and mechanisms by which to address climate change.

After two weeks of negotiation, conference delegates produce text that becomes binding for UNFCCC Parties. These texts have legislated things from the commitment of industrialized nations to reduce emissions, to the direction of funding for climate action, to the upper limit of acceptable warming.

The prominence and importance of these conference proceedings have grown with each year and each increment of warming. The conference itself has expanded to encompass climate action across multiple channels at once.

“There are actually three COPs happening in parallel,” says Woodwell Climate’s Director of International Government Relations, Dr. Matti Goldberg, who has learned the ins and outs of the conference over 15 years spent working for the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat.

The first layer is the core of the conference— the negotiations. This is the space where each participating country sends delegates to argue on their behalf. The agenda for each year’s negotiations is developed during preparatory meetings of the delegates, with planning sometimes starting two years in advance, and resulting in agendas of 50-60 interlinked issues. COPs are typically judged as successes or failures based on the strength of the resulting text from the formal negotiations. The complexity of the issues, and the negotiating tactics of different countries, tend to push final agreements well beyond the scheduled closing of the COP.

Then there’s what Goldberg calls the “high-level COP.” This is the platform for heads of state to showcase their country’s progress on various issues. Think, speeches from the president, announcements of new coalitions, hand-shaking between ministers, or denunciations of other countries’ lack of action. Although the high-level COP can feel like superficial performance, deals between countries can help move the negotiations forward— or delay them, depending on a country’s interests.

Surrounding both the formal negotiations and closed door deals is the “third COP” — also referred to as the “Blue Zone”: a space open to scientists, NGOs, activists, and companies for hosting side events, pavilions with panel talks and presentations, forge new partnerships, hold protests, and apply pressure on negotiators. The third COP also spills out into a “Green Zone”, a space where those not badged for the official conference can organize events and contribute to the momentum of the moment.

What does an NGO do at COP?

For an organization like Woodwell Climate, the third COP is the main stage on which to contribute to the conference.

“Our first priority is to showcase our research and its relevance to the key questions of each year’s COP,” says Goldberg.

At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Woodwell Climate will host a pavilion to showcase the organization’s work in several key areas, including climate risks and national security, accounting for growing natural emissions sources like permafrost thaw and wildfires, as well as emerging collaborations with new partner countries such as Ethiopia. The pavilion also serves as a convening place to discuss work with partners.

“The sheer scale of participation at COPs makes them critical annual opportunities to solidify existing partnerships and build new ones,” says Goldberg.

While participants of this third COP aren’t officially part of negotiations, Woodwell Climate scientists still have opportunities to participate in the more formal COP processes. Each COP hosts an “Earth Information Day” where scientists exchange data and research with country delegations to better inform decision making. At COP29, Woodwell has proposed to highlight the latest research on wildfire emissions.

Scientists also have a role to play in ensuring national emissions reductions plans are based on accurate numbers—a point that Woodwell Climate will be emphasizing both at this COP and beyond. In 2025, countries must submit their updated 5-year climate targets (called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) to the UNFCCC. The adequacy of those targets depends on how much carbon can still be emitted without surpassing the agreed-upon maximum limit of warming.

“Our research on permafrost and wildfires indicates that the global carbon budget available for staying below the 1.5 degrees Celcius temperature limit might be much smaller than countries are thinking right now,” says Goldberg. “From the Woodwell perspective, it would be great to remind the international community that the numbers need to add up. We need to take into account these emissions that are not being discussed.”

Successes and failures in three decades of COP

Over his tenure with the UN Secretariat, Goldberg has witnessed both promising action and frustrating setbacks, sometimes at the same conference.

COP15, held in Copenhagen in 2009 was one of those moments for him. Here negotiations decayed, and the weak resulting agreement failed to legally bind countries to emissions reductions.

“Turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving,” Goldberg jokes. “Countries will generally not agree to a regime that will force them to take on targets determined at the UN or by others.”

But Goldberg says that Copenhagen did, at least, define a new paradigm where every country would commit to doing something. Voluntarily, and perhaps not ambitiously enough, but in a year widely considered a failure, steps towards universal climate cooperation were still made.

Each successive COP built upon this new paradigm and in 2015 the conference arrived at another milestone— the Paris Agreement. This is the framework under which the world operates today, with every country creating NDCs appropriate to their size and resources, with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

The agreement spurred more conversation around how that goal would be achieved, and in 2018 the parties adopted a rulebook for its implementation. Since then, however, Goldberg says many of the conferences have been “searching for real purpose” — some kind of action to match the ambition of the Paris Agreement. But, in Goldberg’s mind, that doesn’t necessarily indicate a failure of the process.

“You can’t have a spectacle forever,” says Goldberg. “At some point the pressure should be less on the COP itself and more on countries actually working under the Paris Agreement to get more ambitious about what they’re doing, and probably making some very painful decisions at the national level.”

Climate has the world’s attention

But of course, policy making moves slowly, both for the UN and national governments. And with each year that passes, cooperation and increased ambition becomes more urgent. In 2023, record high temperatures spurred conversations about whether the 1.5 degree limit has already been surpassed. In five years, Goldberg states, “it might be way too late even to pretend that we are under that limit.”

But Goldberg remains hopeful. Before the COPs, before 30 years of tough conversations attempting to find a way through the climate crisis, Goldberg says, the prevailing thought among political scientists was that international cooperation on this scale was a fantasy. But despite its failures, the process has persisted, inching the world towards climate action. Other international treaties have taken their lead from this process as well, hosting COPs to address issues like plastic pollution and biodiversity.

“The fact that there are so many people dedicated to solving this and to working through mutual disagreements, that people haven’t walked away, makes me hopeful,” says Goldberg. “This is possibly the hardest global policy problem there is, and it has the world’s attention. I think that’s very positive.”

Where has all the rain gone? Bone-dry October strikes much of US

dry vegetation growing out of cracked dry soil

A bone-dry October is pushing nearly half of the United States into a flash drought, leading to fires in the Midwest and hindering shipping on the Mississippi River.

More than 100 different long-term weather stations in 26 states, including Alaska, are having their driest October on record, through Sunday, according to records by the Southern Regional Climate Center and Midwest Regional Climate Center. Cities that have had no measurable rain for October include New York, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Sioux City, Iowa, along with normal dry spots such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, National Weather Service records show.