Heat waves have a drastic impact on urban populations, which could increase with climate change. The authors evaluated new indicators of elderly people’s exposure to heat in Paris, from a public health prevention perspective, using satellite thermal images.

Climate change is expected to have a range of health impacts, some of which are already apparent. Public health adaptation is imperative, but there has been little discussion of how to increase adaptive capacity and resilience in public health systems. The authors explored possible explanations for the lack of work on adaptive capacity, outline climate–health challenges that may lie outside public health’s coping range, and consider changes in practice that could increase public health’s adaptive capacity.

An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures. This uncertainty partly reflects the relative lack of observations of crop behaviour in farmers’ fields under extreme heat. We used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor rates of wheat senescence following exposure to temperatures greater than 34 °C.

Extreme climate events such as heat waves are expected to increase in frequency under global change. As one indirect effect, they can alter magnitude and direction of species interactions, for example those between hosts and parasites. We simulated a summer heat wave to investigate how a changing environment affects the interaction between the broad-nosed pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) as a host and its digenean trematode parasite (Cryptocotyle lingua).

Extreme cold and heat waves, characterized by a number of cold or hot days in succession, place a strain on people's cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The increase in deaths due to these waves may be greater than that predicted by extreme temperatures alone.