It is unbearably hot. On Monday, I heard that more than ten observation sites recorded daily highs over 40 degrees. Yesterday, a smartphone alert finally said the outside temperature at 10 pm was 33 degrees. Seeing a social media post that read “Maybe the planet is running a sterilization cycle and humans are cluelessly walking around,” I let out a hollow laugh because it felt true. The dystopian heat continues, yet the daily life of an office worker in a big city has not changed much. I gasp for breath walking to the bus stop and am drenched in sweat while transferring to the subway, but once I step into the air-conditioned office and sit down, a comfortably dry day begins as usual. Walks and workouts have become difficult, but that is about it.

People are dying to the point that all this sounds idle. According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, as of the 3rd, 19 people nationwide had died due to the heat wave. On the 25th of last month in Haenam, Gwangju, South Jeolla Province, a Thai man in his 30s who was a migrant worker collapsed and died while applying fertilizer in a pepper field amid the heat. It was only his third day after entering the country. He arrived on a tourist visa and immediately began working through a labor agency, and on the day of the accident he had also worked in the field starting at 6:30 am. In the past month alone, four migrant workers died while working in the heat.

In the film <Parasite>, the Ki-taek family becomes disaster victims when their semi-basement home is flooded by a downpour, while Park, a wealthy homeowner, and Yeon-gyo, who live in a luxurious mansion, say that the weather has improved after so much rain and prepare a garden party. Heat waves and the climate crisis are disasters that strike all living things on Earth equally, but their impacts are discriminatory. More precisely, disasters draw out and attack the vulnerabilities that run through me in even more dramatic ways. For migrant workers, insecure residency status and limited Korean language ability, when combined with a disaster like a heat wave, become variables that determine life or death rather than mere discrimination.

The more vulnerabilities intersect, the greater the risk becomes. For example, residents of flophouse districts are among the groups most threatened by heat waves, and even among them, women suffer more. A 2021 report titled Intensifying Climate Crisis, Female Migrant Agricultural Workers, and Women in Flophouse Districts by Energy and Climate Policy Institute researchers Jung Eun-a and Habara includes this testimony: “When it is hot, those who go outside to cool off are all men. Even if it is unbearably hot, women stay at home. They shower and turn on the fan.” On tropical nights, male residents sometimes go outside to escape the heat, but for female residents who have to endure the discomfort and threat of entering male-dominated spaces, that is difficult. There were also reports that although the Seoul Metropolitan Government installed air conditioners in shared spaces in flophouse areas, women kept their doors closed in case of potential danger. It is not that women are inherently more vulnerable to heat waves, but rather that there are situations and environments in which being a woman makes one vulnerable to heat.

Outdoor workers in extreme heat are generally all at high risk for heat illness, yet over the past five years, seven out of ten occupational heat illness cases have been concentrated in small workplaces with fewer than 50 employees. Smaller workplaces inevitably have poorer measures for dealing with heat illness than large companies, and they also employ more older workers. The damage caused by the climate crisis is concentrated near the equator and in less developed countries, and within those regions, the poor suffer the most. Poor older people in cities cool their bodies in summer under trees in parks, in subway stations, or at public shelters, but if they have physical limitations, even leaving home can be difficult. Class and gender, labor market status and age, region and poverty and disability intertwine to amplify risk. Paradoxically, those who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis in their daily lives are likely emitting far less carbon than those who do not need to change their routines for it.

This year is hotter than 1994, which was said to be unbearably hot, hotter than 2018, and hotter than 2024. The intervals between so-called record-breaking heat waves are getting shorter. No one knows how hot next year will be, or the year after that. Instead of ordinary rain, we get torrential downpours, the other seasons bring drought and wildfires, and winters turn extremely cold. How can we prevent disasters caused by increasingly extreme weather. Or can they even be prevented. In a 2022 interview with the Kyunghyang Shinmun, researcher Jung Eun-a said that “in addition to scientific solutions, making society less discriminatory is also a response to the climate crisis.” The point is that beyond slowing the pace of climate change itself, there is something we can do and must do.