Heat as infrastructure, public health and governance

I landed in Geneva and felt as if I was melting. The irony was lost on no one. People joked that the heat should be nothing to me, since I come from a hot country. We survive heat through what surrounds us, the homes, hours and infrastructure shaped around it over centuries. My comfort was engineered long before I arrived to enjoy it.
In Oman and across the Gulf, heat is a design condition. It sets the depth of a wall, the hours we work and rest. Europe was built on a different premise, that winter is the problem worth solving, and this summer is testing it hard: Switzerland set new June heat records three days running, approaching the 40-degree mark.
Here is where the European argument about air-conditioning goes wrong. It asks whether cooling is good or bad for the climate, when a hotter world faces a harder question: how do we cool without warming the planet further? The answer exists, and it is being built. The worry is not baseless. Conventional air-conditioning strains grids, leaks potent refrigerants, and throws waste heat into the street. We cannot air-condition our way out of a heat crisis, as the UN’s environment chief said this year. Cooling only the wealthy fails the climate test too, since heat sorts people by income, hardest on the elderly, the sick and families in thin-walled homes. Cooling now belongs beside water and sanitation, as essential infrastructure.
The proof is already running, some of it in Geneva. A network called GeniLac draws cold water from the depths of the lake to cool and heat buildings across the city, using around 80 per cent less energy than conventional units, part of the canton’s climate strategy. Efficient heat pumps, district cooling and cleaner refrigerants work today. The real obstacles are capital, political will, and whether knowledge is allowed to move.
For generations, climate expertise flowed outward from the cool, wealthy capitals. Heat is reversing that current. The knowledge of living well in high temperatures now sits with the countries that never had the luxury of forgetting it, and invention is following, with most of the world’s patents today filed in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In fact, India is among the fastest-rising inventors anywhere. What the temperate world is only beginning to need, the hot world has practised for centuries.
This is a real opening for Oman. Our inheritance is specific and still standing: the mudbrick towns of Al Hamra that hold the night’s cool past noon, the falaj that carries water and coolness through a settlement, the wind tower and the shaded lane. This is design knowledge that travels, as codes and methods for building in extreme heat, as passive cooling that a warming Europe will increasingly have to learn. A country that has managed heat for centuries can become a place where hot-climate solutions are studied, tested and sent outward, rather than only bought in.
Coming from Oman does not make me immune to heat. It taught me to read heat as infrastructure, public health and governance, the sum of a society’s choices about who gets to stay cool. This is knowledge we hold, in the thick old walls that still work and in the cooler cities we know how to design. The warming world will need what the hot countries have always known. The only open question is how quickly the rest of it decides to learn.