How climate change is making the mission of Meals on Wheels even more important - USA TODAY
Climate change is making Meals on Wheels even more important
How climate change is making the mission of Meals on Wheels even more important
Danielle Renwick
Nexus Media News
This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News
When an unprecedented heat wave bore down on Portland, Oregon, in June 2021, Jonna Papaefthimiou, the city’s chief resilience officer, immediately thought of the city’s most vulnerable populations: older people sweltering, often alone, in their homes.
She called Suzanne Washington, who runs the local chapter of Meals on Wheels. “That overlap of their demographic and the demographic that faces great risk from heat is almost identical,” Papaefthimiou said.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.