Table 3 Future collaborative work among various sub-topics and disciplines

Thermal physiology

Create a catalog of specific estimates of skin wettedness, skin temperature, and maximum sweat rates across population types, ages, medications intake, and health disorders/chronic diseases.

Model the impact of personal cooling strategies, such as dousing or misting skin, electric fans, and foot or hand immersion in water^78,79.

Conduct a sensitivity analysis of wind flow impacts within the liveability and survivability models, and activity velocity impacts for liveability.

Model changes to behavior based on thermal exposure (e.g., Vargas et al.⁸⁰) and other physiological attributes that affect adaptive behavior.

Characterize other measures of physiological heat strain, including cardiovascular and renal strain (not only heat stroke, as modeled here).

Test and model different clothing factors within the liveability and survivability models.

Empirically test maximum duration of intensity safe activities (M_max) in different extreme environmental conditions and describe the changes in skin temperature and sweat rate over time and across the lifespan (e.g., refs. ^39,62,81) to allow for appropriate ranges and scaling factors applied within both liveability and survivability models.

Improve the steady-state version of the model, as applied here, to account for changes within the 3–6 hour exposure in the variables assumed as constant.

Conduct experiments across a range of plausible biophysical parameters for uncertainty estimation and subsequent model application across different temperature/humidity combinations along the survivability and liveability threshold curves.

Climate sciences

Run the present model using multiple GCMs and emissions scenarios to provide an ensemble of futures, addressing various sources of uncertainty, including that from both the biophysical and climate models (e.g., Petkova et al.⁸²).

Obtain regional or city-specific analysis of future heat stress with downscaled, bias-corrected climate projections.

Evaluate time-of-emergence for different survivability and livability thresholds using single (global climate) model initial-condition large ensembles (SMILEs).

Assess the relative importance of human population trends (increase in the number of people, aging) versus climate change in future health burdens from extreme heat.

Quantify the probability of exceptional heat wave and/or mass heat fatality events over different regions with different levels of climate change.

Public health

Determine the sources of differences between physiological models and epidemiological models to inform future model improvements.

Quantify compounding and cascading risks connected to heat and health, including heatwaves compounded by wildfires.

Evaluate the extent to which different urban designs would alter liveability or survivability.

Leverage the new modeling capabilities along with projected global demographics to better determine impact across a diverse population for public health preparedness.