Climate Change and Heatwaves: Impact, Adaptation, and Climate Justice

With climate change exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, individuals and social systems face growing disruptions that are unevenly distributed across social divides. Rising temperatures reshape behavior, everyday routines, and social interactions, intensifying existing inequalities in access to thermal comfort. Heat is a meteorological hazard and a socially produced phenomenon whose impacts are mediated by labor structures, urban infrastructure, and intersecting axes of class, gender, race, and age.

The session aims to advance sociological inquiry into heat and heatwaves, their differential impacts across populations, and the individual, collective, and institutional responses they demand. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative traditions, the session invites contributions that illuminate the lived experience of heat stress, the social production of thermal vulnerability, and the justice dimensions of climate adaptation. Particular attention will be given to emerging and contested topics, including urban heat inequalities, occupational heat exposure, energy insecurity and cooling access, climate migration, and the burden of heat on vulnerable and marginalized communities. The session also welcomes work on cascading risks—including droughts, wildfire smoke, and infrastructure failures—as well as perspectives from the Global South, where research on social adaptation to urban heat remains underrepresented.

We invite presentations on diverse topics, including but not limited to:

• the differential impacts of heatwaves on populations;
• adaptation mechanisms and coping strategies under heat stress;
• the role of urban and rural structures in shaping thermal exposure;
• resilience–vulnerability interactions;
• multi-level perspectives on heat governance and policy;
• methodological innovations for studying lived experiences of extreme heat.