When Dr Adelle Thomas, Senior Director, Climate Adaptation and Environmental Health, NRDC, stepped up to address the Global Heat and Cooling Forum 2026, she was not there to sound the alarm. Others had already done that. She was there to talk solutions — and to hold up a mirror to why, despite everything we know, the world keeps falling short. "We already know what to do. We've already planned it out. We've already tested it in pilots. What is missing is the political will, the institutional coordination, and the finance needed to do it at scale," she said. It was a line that needed no elaboration.

Progress on Paper, Gaps on the Ground
Dr Thomas drew her evidence from the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, where she was part of a global team that assessed thousands of papers on adaptation actions from across the world, with a particular focus on the Global South and South Asia.

The first thing the evidence showed was genuinely encouraging. At least 170 countries and many cities now include adaptation in their policies and planning. Climate services and decision-support tools are being used. Pilots are running. "This represents real progress," she said. 

But the second finding cut through the optimism. Most of what is happening on the ground is fragmented, small in scale, and incremental. It is sector-specific. And crucially, it is designed to address current or near-term risks — not the longer-term extremes that are already beginning to arrive. "Adaptation action is growing — but not yet at the scale or depth required to significantly reduce climate risks," she said.

Who Is Actually Carrying the Weight
The third finding was about distribution, and it was uncomfortable. Adaptation is concentrated in certain regions and population groups. The largest gaps exist among lower-income populations in the Global South. And at current rates, those gaps will not close. They will grow.

The fourth finding brought it closer to home. The burden of adaptation, Dr Thomas said, is falling on households and individuals — concentrated in both Africa and Asia. Without financial support, people are quietly adjusting how they live, when they work, where they sleep — not because systems are helping them, but because systems are not. "This creates further adaptation gaps between those who can afford to adapt and those who cannot and continue to suffer," she said.

What the Evidence Actually Shows Works
On extreme heat specifically, Dr Thomas was unambiguous. The IPCC found with high confidence that early warning systems, when genuinely combined with heat action plans, public communication, and health system preparedness, reduce heat-related mortality.
The condition, however, matters. These systems have to be institutionalised. They have to be locally tailored. A plan designed somewhere else and applied without adaptation does not save lives. "Integration matters more than any single intervention," she said. "Fragmented responses underperform — even when the individual technical components are sound."

Heat as a Permanent Design Factor
The sharpest turn in her address came when she moved to what the IPCC calls climate resilient development — pursuing development pathways that reduce climate risk while improving equity and keeping warming as low as possible.

Applied to heat, she said, this framework changes the entire framing. Heat and cooling, she noted, are flip sides of the same coin — something the forum had already been grappling with. Climate-resilient development is the framework that holds both together.
"Heat is no longer treated as an occasional emergency," she said. "It becomes a permanent design factor — shaping how we plan cities, housing, infrastructure, labour systems, and energy pathways."

In other words, heat stops being a crisis we respond to. It becomes a condition we design around, from the very beginning.
She closed with a thought that was equal parts challenge and possibility. Heat, she said, could serve as a blueprint — a test case for how climate resilience thinking gets applied to every other hazard the world is facing. "This provides a real opportunity to transform how we think about climate action and development," she said. The knowledge exists. The pilots have run. The findings are in.

What the world is still waiting on, she made clear, is the will to act on them.