Adapting Industry to Withstand Rising Temperatures and Future Heatwaves was launched this morning (26 April) at the institution’s headquarters in Westminster. Authored by Dr Laura Kent, IMechE public affairs and policy advisor, and Dr Tim Fox, chair of the IMechE’s climate change adaptation working group, it found that global efforts must focus on adaptation to soaring temperatures, as well as mitigation. In industry, that will involve improving workplaces to protect staff and maintain productivity.
The launch was opened by Professor Jason Lowe OBE, head of climate services at the Met Office, who highlighted the current effects of climate change – rising seas, increasing flooding, and a 1.1ºC increase in average temperatures. The UK could see extreme temperatures of 45ºC, he said, or even 50ºC later in the century, in higher emissions scenarios.
Heat dome
The report was motivated by the 2021 ‘heat dome’ in Western Canada and the US Pacific Northwest, which smashed temperature records with highs of almost 50ºC, killing more than a thousand people.
The disaster highlighted a lack of focus on adaptation to rising temperatures, said Dr Fox, particularly in the workplace.
“A lot of people died because they didn't have access to cooling… we can’t work in extreme heat,” said Dr Kent. “Industry is the backbone of our economy – not just our economy, but global economies. Pretty much every country in the world, as we get hotter and hotter, will really need to learn to deal with these warmer temperatures.”
Maintaining industrial productivity is particularly important because we will rely on sectors such as chemical processing, advanced new materials and biofuel production to help achieve net zero, said Dr Fox. “Many of these industries are in the process of transitioning into the net zero world, and many of these industries we’re going to rely on for many years to reduce their emissions.”
Enabling that will mean significant industrial adaptation to extreme temperatures, both in the UK and globally.
Buildings are often not designed to cope with heat extremes, however. They might use construction materials that are not suited, they lack insulated roofs to prevent heat getting in, they typically do not have shading, and they have high internal heat loads, Dr Fox said.
To tackle those issues, companies must “build back better” when updating facilities, according to the report, introducing ‘sustainable net zero cooling’.
“The conundrum here is that cooling is a significant contributor to climate change already, but we need it to adapt to higher temperatures. So we really need to take a completely different approach to how we provide cooling, not only to industrial buildings but also to plants themselves,” said Dr Fox.
“We need to think in a whole systems approach, we need to think about other sources of cooling – not just electricity driving cooling equipment.”
Approaches could involve looking at ways to reduce the demand for cooling in the first place, he told Professional Engineering, looking carefully at processes and considering if natural ventilation or the placing of equipment could reduce heat.
“There is a lot that goes on in an industrial site now where the equipment is not placed optimally to reduce the impact of one piece of equipment on another piece of equipment, in terms of heat transfer,” he said.
“When you have a demand for cooling, there’s a lot that can be done to aggregate demand for cooling across a site, and then to deal with it centrally and to provide that cooling from either natural resources, bodies of water or underground sources of cooling.”
Other areas of focus should include using renewable energy, energy efficiency, low global warming potential refrigerants, and preventing waste cooling, he said. “LNG regasification is a good example. When a gas is regasified there’s a lot of cooling produced, and that’s just let out into the environment – it could be tapped into and used for cooling in another part of the site, or on an adjacent site.”
‘Governments have been really slow’
Politicians in the UK and abroad must do more to increase the urgency of climate change adaptation, said Dr Kent, taking steps to update building design codes and regulation to incorporate and reflect the latest temperature data.
“Governments globally have been really slow to recognise the need to adapt,” she said. “There's work that could be done around just raising awareness of the impacts, risk assessments and things like that, but also supporting developers, financiers, lenders – people with money – to fund adaptation projects.”
More concerning than loss of productivity is the increased threat to worker health and the possibility of deaths as temperatures rise.
“Health and safety agencies, in the UK that would be HSE, should be doing more in terms of protecting workers and protecting people, more generally – providing access to cooling, because it's a health emergency as well as an economic emergency,” said Dr Kent.
“There's a role for them to do more with employers and employees to make sure that they're not being put under undue heat stress at work, and building those case studies and recommendations, regulations maybe, to just make sure people stay hydrated.”
With temperatures rising rapidly there is no time to waste, as highlighted by John Dora, director of climate adaptation consultancy Climate Sense, during a panel discussion at the launch event. “We’ve seen global change in the past five years,” he said. “From my perspective, it seems to be more rapid than we thought 10 years ago. 10 years ago I was looking at adaptation projections saying things that would happen in the 2040s. It’s the 2020s. Things are happening now.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.