For the world’s climate negotiators, 1.5°C is a global average, a hard-won temperature goal and a future pathway. For fishing households in the Philippines, it is a more immediate calculation: whether to work through dangerous heat, lose a day’s income, or absorb the rising costs of daily needs.
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Roger Fabillar, 54, has fished since he was 15. A third-generation fisher from Barangay Salcedo in Eastern Samar, he offers a glimpse of how extreme heat is reshaping daily life for one of the sectors most exposed to rising temperatures, according to a recent Greenpeace study.
Fabillar said he and fellow fishers began noticing increasingly punishing conditions after Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated the province in 2013. Before then, they could leave for the sea at 6am and fish until 3pm. Now, they often return by 10am because the heat becomes unbearable.
The shorter working day has cut into their earnings. Fabillar said a typical day’s catch once brought in about P1,500 (US$24) – enough to pay for food and transport for his children, who attend school about five kilometres from their remote village. With catches now becoming smaller, he said, the household income no longer stretches as far.
“The heat has affected how much we make as fishermen and is directly affecting our daily needs,” Fabillar told Eco-Business. “Usually, our children are absent from school if we do not make enough money for their transportation and food because of the limited catch.”
Roger Fabillar, a fisher from Eastern Samar, belongs to one of the Philippines’ poorest sectors, with poverty incidence reaching 30.6 per cent, nearly double the 15.1 per cent national rate. Extreme heat is increasingly threatening fishing communities’ health and livelihoods. Image: Greenpeace.
At sea, Fabillar said fishers sometimes jump into the sea to cool down, but the relief is short-lived. Saltwater leaves their skin itchy, and they eventually decide to head home.
They have also observed changes in where fish are found. Fish once caught in nearby coastal bakawan, or mangrove areas, appear to have moved into deeper waters, he said, possibly to escape warmer conditions. Reaching them requires longer trips and more fuel – further squeezing already thin incomes.
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The heat has affected how much we make as fishermen and is directly affecting our daily needs. Usually, our children are absent from school if we do not make enough money for their transportation and food because of the limited catch.
Roger Fabillar, fisherman, Eastern Samar
He said the heat has also raised fears about health risks. A fisher from neighbouring Guiuan municipality reportedly died after suffering heat stroke, an incident that alarmed local fishing communities.
“We got scared because of that incident,” Fabillar said. “At our age, we can no longer be sure how much extreme heat our bodies can take.”
His experience raises a larger question: can communities whose incomes depend on working in increasingly punishing conditions afford the global system’s proposed “temporary” overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit?
Living through the overshoot
The question has gained urgency following a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released on 2 September, which warned that the world is likely to exceed 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels within the next few years.
UNEP’s most ambitious scenario sees warming peak at around 1.8°C, while other pathways point to a rise of more than 2°C. The report argued that the best remaining option is an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway, which includes acting fast to limit both the peak level of warming and the length of time the world spends above 1.5°C, followed by a return below the threshold as soon as possible.
“This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the report’s launch. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.”
Achieving that pathway would require immediate, sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, alongside rapid progress towards net zero emissions. To lower global temperatures after their peak, the world would need to go further, reaching sustained net-negative carbon dioxide emissions.
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We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.
António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations
UNEP said carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, will be necessary alongside deep emissions cuts, not as a substitute for them. CDR methods include restoring forests and other ecosystems as well as engineered approaches to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it.
A later return below 1.5°C would not restore the world to its earlier state, UNEP cautioned. Some losses and damages could be irreversible or persist for centuries, including ecosystem disruption and impacts related to long-term sea-level rise.
The report said adaptation must therefore proceed alongside mitigation and be designed for the unequal and changing conditions communities will face during an overshoot period.
Yet locally tailored heat alerts, accessible drinking water, shaded rest areas, heat-health services, safer work arrangements and social protection remain limited in many remote coastal communities, including those in Eastern Samar.
For fishers such as Fabillar, the question is whether those protections will arrive before dangerous heat is no longer a manageable risk and further erodes their health and livelihood.
Extending heat protection beyond cities
The dangers facing the fishing communities raise a wider question: is the global response to extreme heat reaching people beyond cities?
Heat resilience has long been discussed mainly through an urban lens. Cities can be hotter than surrounding areas because concrete and asphalt absorb and retain heat – a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect.
But extreme heat is not only an urban challenge, said Eleni Myrivili, Global Chief Heat Officer for UN-Habitat and the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, who also works with UNEP’s Cool Coalition.
“Some of the most exposed people are those who work outdoors and depend directly on natural ecosystems for their livelihoods, including fisherfolk, coastal workers, farmers and informal labourers,” Myrivili told Eco-Business.
Eleni Myrivili, Global Chief Heat Officer for UN-Habitat and the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, who also works with UNEP’s Cool Coalition. Image: Atlantic Council
Myrivili’s role involves pressing governments and city leaders to treat heat as a serious disaster and public health risk, rather than a seasonal inconvenience. UNEP’s Beat the Heat initiative, for instance, brings cities and partners together to identify needs and link plans with technical and financial support.
Her office does not have authority to require cities or countries to adopt heat plans, allocate budgets, issue warnings or direct disaster response. Instead, it relies on technical assistance, advocacy and coalition-building to create the political mandate, tools and partnerships that can support action.
In Athens, where Myrivili previously served as Europe’s first chief heat officer, authorities introduced a heatwave warning system linked to local mortality data, opened cooling spaces and operated a public hotline with the Red Cross.
The wider UN-Habitat and Atlantic Council network has since supported chief heat officer roles in Asia Pacific cities including Dhaka, Bangladesh and Melbourne, Australia.
For countries such as the Philippines, the task is to integrate heat resilience into broader climate resilience planning, Myrivili said.
Communities face overlapping pressures from extreme heat and humidity, sea-level rise and stronger storms, requiring coordinated action by local governments, fisherfolk associations, community organisations, public health agencies and employers.
The challenge, she said, is to move from a “place-based” to a “vulnerability-based” approach. “The central question is not whether someone lives in a city, but whether they are protected from dangerous heat exposure,” she said.
That means extending early-warning systems, healthcare, cooling access and practical heat-risk information to rural and coastal communities, while investing in long-term adaptation that reflects how people live and work.
For fisherfolk, this could include alerts that reach people at sea and at landing sites, safe water, shade and rest facilities at ports and markets; heat-illness training, accessible health care and emergency transport; and energy efficient cold storage that protects catches and household incomes.
Myrivili said this approach is being developed through UNEP’s forthcoming ‘Global Roadmap on Heat Resilience for a Warming World’, a flexible framework governments began shaping in September.
UNEP said the roadmap aims to protect people from extreme heat and safeguard essential services and critical systems, including schools, hospitals, workplaces and energy infrastructure, while bringing together adaptation, resilience and mitigation goals.
It centres on the idea of thermal safety, asking two questions: are people safe as temperatures rise, and can the systems they depend on keep functioning?
Those questions apply as much to a fisher leaving for sea or a coastal market worker handling a catch as to a resident of a major city, Myrivili said.
“Protecting frontline workers sits squarely at the intersection of both. If workers are not safe, communities become more vulnerable. If the people and systems that provide food, transport, energy, and livelihoods are disrupted by heat, resilience breaks down,” she said.
“As temperatures continue to rise, protecting those on the climate frontline is not a separate agenda from heat resilience. It is at its very heart.”
