Southeast Asia’s urban heat islands

July 2, 2024

MANILA – From Suvarnabhumi Airport, getting to the city is a breeze, especially with the robust air-conditioning inside the Airport Rail Link, which takes under 30 minutes to reach the centrally located stations of Makkasan or Phaya Thai.

Once you exit the train, however, you begin to feel the high temperatures that Bangkok has been notorious of late, especially during the recent heat wave. Although I still stuck to my plan of taking the 15-minute walk to my hotel, part of me wishes that I just took an additional train ride—or even taking GrabBike: a fast and cheap option to cut through the traffic, albeit reminiscent at times of a roller-coaster ride.

“It was worse in April,” Kritaya Sreesunpagit—my Equity Initiative colleague and a native of Bangkok—told me, recalling the days when the mercury broke past 40 degrees Celsius, and hovered in the high 30s. “But it’s still very hot nowadays, and it feels hotter than before.”

Having grown up in the tropics; having spent a big part of my life in Manila, I know what the noxious combination of heat and humidity feels like. When I was in medical school, I stayed in an old dorm-style house in Malate, which had no air-conditioning. Despite being habituated to tropical heat, however, I think I’m inclined to agree that heat today feels worse, if not in Bangkok, then at least in Manila.

The main suspect, of course, is climate change, and there is strong empirical evidence furnished by scientists not only that our planet has truly warmed, but that this warming is caused by humans. Ominously, the World Weather Attribution group has found that climate change has made heat waves in the region “30 times more likely and much hotter,” and specifically for the Philippines, the