The past three months will go down in the books as the hottest meteorological summer on record in Boston — but that is not a record that’s likely to stand long. At 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1970, Massachusetts has outpaced the national average by half a degree; by 2050, researchers expect the state will see more than two-dozen 90-plus-degree days every year. According to a 2023 climate report, that could result in as many as 400 excess deaths in the Commonwealth annually.
Now it’s someone’s job to do something about it. In mid-August, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced the appointment of the state’s first heat resilience officer, making the Commonwealth only the second state in the country to have such a position — after the much more obvious choice, Arizona. (Healey is up for reelection this year, but the race is largely expected to be uncompetitive.) The inaugural role has gone to Katie Schlick, who most recently headed the resilience portfolio at the U.S. Climate Alliance and previously served as a special assistant to Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate advisor under Joe Biden.
I caught up with Schlick at the end of her first full week on the job to learn more about what leading heat resilience in a state like Massachusetts will look like in practice. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Why does Massachusetts need a heat resilience officer?
This role was established because Governor Healy has seen the science and the public health data on heat risk in the state and worldwide. But she’s also heard from, felt, and understands the lived experiences of communities all across Massachusetts who are really dangerously impacted by extreme heat — and increasingly so.
We know that extreme heat is the No. 1 killer across all other extreme weather events, and that fact holds true not just for the United States but also globally. July was the hottest month ever recorded, and the last three years are the hottest ever recorded in human history. And heat waves in cities are about 46 days longer than they were in the 1960s.
Those are the trends that we’re seeing in the science. But we’ve also seen tons of impacts in the state. Massachusetts itself has warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century, and then we’re expecting those numbers to double, if not triple, in the coming decades. We saw 1,500 heat-related emergency room visits in 2025 alone, and we’re seeing higher numbers of visits on unhealthy heat days. We have heat island communities and heat equity communities in the state that are literally degrees hotter because of decades of complicated history. One in five public schools in the Commonwealth don’t have air conditioning, and that only not only impacts learning, but also, when school is closed because it’s too hot to keep the kids and the the staff in the building, then that means parents and guardians have to leave their jobs and figure out child care, which impacts the economy. There are projections that about 20% of the workforce in Massachusetts is exposed in some way to extreme heat, and that impacts work hours, productivity and the economy. And, of course, there are tons of impacts to our natural environment, crop losses in the agriculture sector.
I’ve been calling these the geographies of heat resilience, and I think what we’ve seen from the governor is an understanding that this means we need to put the full weight of the state government behind solutions. It will be a whole government, whole of community process, assessing what the work is that’s already been done to date — and we’ve seen a lot of great stuff coming out of the Department of Public Health, with their different extreme heat initiatives and a lot of good data tracking. Even just in these past two weeks or so, as I’m getting up to speed, there’s a lot of real energy and momentum and excitement from partners all across the state, academia, community organizations, local governments, and regional organizations, who have also seen this problem and are really eager to be part of the solution.
Speaking of academia, I spoke earlier this week to Professor John Rogan at Clark University about the role forests and trees play in cooling communities, particularly in western Massachusetts. Are nature-based solutions part of what you’re considering?
I’m glad you brought him up, because last week we had an event at Clark University, which is the home to the HERO program. It’s been operating for several decades now in Worcester, and I spoke to some of the students last week who were out there all summer researching different types of trees — both if they are resilient themselves to the impacts of hotter temperatures, but also the shade cover, and is it impacting and increasing or decreasing the temperature of different neighborhoods?
What they found is, shade from trees can cool down certain areas and neighborhoods by several degrees, as can white roofs and greener spaces. And not only does it cool an area down, which means that you’re hopefully able to spend less on your electricity bill, but having greener spaces creates safer communities and contributes to public safety. It is also a great space for families to go out and hang out. Nature-based solutions are something I’m excited to dig into, and something that I know our climate chief is really passionate about as well.
One of the big things about heat is that it’s a hyperlocal issue. How are you thinking about that in Massachusetts, where you have large cities and quieter suburbs and remote towns spread across the state?
That’s why this role is positioned at the state level. We’ve seen across the country that there are different regional approaches to heat, and I think that’s important as well — we’ll be leaning into working with our regional and local partners and community organizations — but it’s also important to have someone at the state level who can coordinate all of this, and make sure that there is attention for all the different pieces. Even just last week, during our [Clark University event], we were talking about the rural areas and different research that is showing how even if they might be a little bit cooler right now, because they don’t have the urban effect, eventually those temperature levels are going level out, so they’ll see hotter temperatures as well. So we need to take a whole of state approach. We have an understanding of the social issues and impacts around heat, like school closures, job loss, and impacts to productivity, as well as the health and safety needs and trends, and we’re paying attention to all of the above.
How does the region’s older housing stock affect your approach to heat resilience in the state?
One of the big challenges that we see in the Northeast for living with climate change is that our built environment was generally constructed to keep people warm during intense winters. Now we are having to do a lot of thinking on the loan side about making sure our housing stock and our buildings are resilient to all sorts of climate impacts, whether that be extreme winds or hail or other types of storms and flooding, but also how it can keep people cool during instances of extreme heat.
One of the things we’ll be thinking through is different solutions to decarbonizing our building stock. We want to make sure that people have access to air conditioning, but we also want to make sure they can afford to pay their electricity bill. But we’ve seen rates skyrocket, and that’s one of the hottest topics these days. We want to make sure that we have access to cooling, not just for homeowners, but also for tenants. If someone can’t get access to that in the near term, do we have community cooling centers? Do they have transit to them? And are they aware of where they are? And do we have good community leaders that can help us maintain those?
Again, going back to schools, we’ve seen under this federal administration a huge slash of the funding that went out under the Biden administration for greener schools. We want to make sure that schools are decarbonizing, but also that they are safe and healthy for students to be in and learn in, even on the hottest and smokiest of days. And there are a lot of cool solutions for decarbonizing buildings in general, whether it be with weatherization, insulation, other types of retrofits, cool roofs, or heat pumps — which is something the governor has championed, and I think a good example of how we can think through incentives for different technologies that are more cost effective and easily implementable.
What most excites you about this job, at the end of your first full week? What projects are you most excited to tackle?
For a long time, I’ve loved working on climate resilience issues. I’m such a climate policy person in general, both on the mitigation and the resilience side. But I think resilience in particular reminds us that it’s not just doom and gloom that we’re experiencing, but also hope and possibilities. It’s about leaning into partnership and innovation.
We’ll be establishing a council that will help us get our arms around the breadth of this challenge. We’ll be putting together a plan that also outlines our levers for change across state and local government, and our opportunities for action. But when I think about the different metrics of success for this role at a high level over the next couple of years, we’re hoping to make cooling solutions more affordable for the people of Massachusetts. We want access to clean and cool air, even on the hottest and smokiest days. Wherever you are, we want to see lower school cancellations from heat, and lower emergency room visits, and better health outcomes. We want people to feel more educated on the risks from heat and trained up on how they can respond to them, no matter what their field is. We want to see more heat pumps deployed, and safer workplaces, whether you work inside or outside. We want local governments to feel ready and prepared in the face of something like extreme heat.
All of those are opportunities for action, and to pull in people from across the state to be a part of the solution.
Збогом! Pedja Milosavljevic / AFP via Getty Images
