It’s time to get serious about educating for heat literacy. Global warming (as one of the identified and globalised “crises” contributing to the prefix, “meta”) is well underway. Dreadful heat both on land and in the seas is baked into our collective futures. Frequent and prolonged heatwaves are pushing communities to their limits. We take seriously the UNICEF warning that within 25 years, all children on Earth will be regularly experiencing heatwaves and dangerous heat conditions. Our argument is that heat education is necessary across all formal education sectors (early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary), and at all community levels including informal education. In this article we explore the emergent concept of heat literacy. We consider what this encompasses by framing it as a survival literacy within the context of ongoing exposure to injury, risk or peril in a warming world.
