Heat makes animals and people suffer. Image: picture-alliance
If it is too warm, people start to sweat – that cools them down. A physiologist explains when a heat collapse is imminent and how to protect yourself from it.
Mr. Gunga, as a physiologist you have been researching how people react to heat for decades. With climate change, this topic is becoming more explosive; there is a lot of talk about adaptation. Can humans get used to heat?
We are currently investigating how people react to the rising temperatures in the sub-Saharan region in a very large project of the German Research Foundation, DFG for short, in which ten different institutions are involved. For example, we measure your body temperature, your heart rate, your activity. We use small-scale temperature, wind and humidity data. With the help of the Sentinel satellites, we can observe which fields are currently being harvested; Thanks to GPS, we can sometimes see where people are, whether they are staying at home or whether they are walking ten kilometers to their fields. In another project of this DFG project, the roofs of the houses were painted with highly reflective paint and we are now measuring how great the cooling effect is in the rooms and whether this affects people’s activity.