Downplaying extreme heat: global imaginaries of ‘relative invulnerability’ and ‘common sense’ adaptation

Abstract

This paper explores how extreme heat is spatially and temporally imagined and how such imaginaries shape individual adaptation. It draws on a five month ethnography in Manchester–a temperate Global North city. I introduce ‘relative invulnerability’, a perceptual framework in which essentialist global imaginaries position extreme heat as a problem of the ‘Other’, often in the Global South, while temperate Global North contexts are equated with mastery over temporally rare heatwaves. Second, imagined ‘relative invulnerability’ materializes in what residents term ‘common sense’ adaptation–individual, low-cost, short-term and reactive behaviours. Against these findings, the paper first argues that the lived realities of extreme heat remain unevenly distributed–not only spatially, but also imaginatively. Second, perceptions of ‘relative invulnerability’ and a ‘common sense’ approach to adaptation reproduce vulnerabilities along lines already etched by neoliberal governance by obscuring the obligations of global north states for adaptation and reframing heat adaptation as an individual, entrepreneurial endeavour. Third I suggest that ‘common sense’ adaptation is inherently ideological, revealing people's acceptance of the state's retreat in climate change adaptation. This paper will be of interest to those interested in the everyday politics of vulnerability, climate adaptation, risk perceptions and how extreme heat is encountered ‘from below’.