Introduction by Croakey: In the summer of 2023/24, Sydney got its first mobile cooling hub – a staffed, portable structure set up in a public park, equipped with evidence-based cooling strategies, drinking water and lots of information and support.
The hub was reportedly co-designed by people experiencing homelessness, which makes sense, given that homeless and insecurely housed people ultimately made up the majority of users. It’s hard to get respite from relentless heat when indoor spaces are not accessible.
Protecting people from all over Australia who are homeless from heat stress and mortality was a focus of a presentation at last week’s Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network conference (#HEAL2026).
After many years of working in the homelessness sector, Jon Swain became increasingly alarmed that, although pockets of activity and innovation existed, there was a lack of strategic planning for protecting homeless people in Australian jurisdictions during heat and heatwaves.
In fact, as temperatures soared and Australia’s homelessness problem became more visible, there was an increasing lack of empathy and a creeping appetite for punitive approaches.
In the article below, Marie McInerney reports on what Swain learned from his observations of US homelessness services during a Churchill Fellowship, and his recommendations for responses at community, regional, state and federal levels, as we prepare for the hot summers ahead.
This report for the Croakey Conference News Service comes as extreme heat affects vast areas of northern Australia.
Marie McInerney writes:
“A dangerous cocktail” of risks is set to unfold in Australia this summer: rising temperatures, rising homelessness rates, a record-breaking Niño event, and barely any state or local government protocols dedicated to addressing the converging crisis, an international health conference heard last week.
Jon Swain, who has worked in the homelessness sector for nearly two decades, told the Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Network conference that the two main pieces of advice that go out in Australia during a heatwave are:
Avoid being outside in the hottest part of the day, and
Stay cool indoors.
“This advice isn’t incorrect,” he said. “But what happens in a heatwave if you don’t have shelter?”
Jon Swain presenting at the Heal Network Conference 2026
Policy and planning gap
Last year, after being awarded a Churchill fellowship in 2024, Swain travelled to the United States to investigate how cities, including Austin in Texas, Phoenix in Arizona, and New Orleans in Louisiana, support people who are sleeping rough in the face of extreme heat events. The US is, he said, significantly ahead of Australia in these approaches.
His report, ‘The heat will get here before the housing’, is aimed at policy makers in Australia, including in public health, encouraging them to “review internal documents, policies, and campaigns relating to extreme heat, and assess whether homelessness or unhoused populations are being considered and what interventions are required”.
It also issues a call for action to the Australian community, amid concerns that some local government areas are taking more punitive approaches towards people who are homeless and sleeping rough, saying there is a public responsibility to demand that interventions are provided during extreme heat and other weather events.
In his report, Swain concludes that the climate crisis — in which eight of the nine hottest years ever recorded in Australia have occurred since 2013 — “has fundamentally shifted” risks to people who are homeless.
While it’s never been safe to be unhoused or rough sleep, “the extreme heat (and its impact on other weather systems) necessitates a response akin to a major public health crisis”, he said.
“We need to provide shelter now, and if we don’t, we must hold organisations accountable for their failure to do so.”
The National Climate Risk Assessment predicts, for example, that by 2050, Sydney will experience a 3.7-fold increase in heat-related deaths, rising to more than four fold under a three degrees Celsius warming scenario.
Another session at HEAL2026 heard that the remote town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory already experiences around 143 days a year of temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius which, by the 2050s, is predicted to rise to 170 days per year – nearly an extra four weeks of dangerous heat.
https://x.com/BOM_au/status/2117857040701743512
Rough sleepers vulnerable
Swain, founder and director of Byabarra, an organisation that works for effective, localised responses to extreme weather, wrote earlier this year that there was “no sugar-coating” the official predictions.
However, missing from the 200-plus page National Climate Risk Assessment, he wrote in the Council to Homeless Person’s Parity magazine, were the increased risks faced by people without shelter.
“Homelessness was mentioned only three times, all in relation to property loss resulting from climate change,” he said.
Swain told HEAL2026 the latest (2021) census reported there were 7,000 people sleeping rough in Australia, although the homelessness sector believes the true number could be up to 20-30,000, given “staggering” numbers in regional communities in Central Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria, where many are sleeping in bushland.
There is also a much more hidden type of homelessness, estimated by the census at more than 122,000 across Australia – people forced to ‘couch surf’, or stay in crisis accommodation or boarding houses.
Swain said extreme heat puts people without safe and secure housing at risk, particularly if they are suffering from diabetes, kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, disability, frailty, and medication-related heat sensitivity, such as lithium, valium and other antipsychotic medications.
On top of that are multiple barriers: people who are homeless are often given tents to sleep in that are cheap and poorly ventilated — “they’re little ovens, basically” — while there’s also been a big increase in the number of people living in cars or other vehicles.
People are often advised to go to shopping centres or libraries to stay cool, but they can’t do that if they have pets and belongings that they need to keep safe. Mental health and cognitive disability issues are also risk factors in a heatwave, as is poor and limited access to water.
Climate change is also adding to other environmental risks, including bushfires that can particularly threaten people who are forced to camp in bushland in regional Australia.
Outreach workers had to race against time to warn more than 200 rough sleepers camping in the Ballarat region in Victoria in early 2026 when bushfires burned in multiple places, with 291 warnings issued on the VicEmergency app, the most ever in a single day.
Yet, Swain said, with an El Niño event threatening to drive high temperatures across southeast Australia over summer, only one state and three local government areas across Australia have dedicated heat and homelessness response protocols in place.
“It’s quite a dangerous cocktail that we’re presented with,” he said of the converging factors.
https://www.weatherzone.com/au/news/why-northern-australia-is-enduring-a-longrunning-heatwave/1891649
Lessons from the US
Swain said the homeless heat policy vacuum compares poorly with the COVID-19 pandemic, when homelessness was understood as a public health emergency, and additional housing was made available to get people off the streets, to preserve life and stop surges in emergency departments.
“COVID got a response. Heatwaves for this particular population group don’t,” he said.
Worryingly, he said, there appears to be growing rhetoric around the need for people who are homeless to be “moved on or moved out of the way”.
“But there is nowhere [for them] to move on to,” he said.
In his Churchill report, Swain makes a range of recommendations, based on lessons from the US:
Develop and implement formal training modules within the homelessness and public health sectors, focused on heat-related risks. This should include modules for media, frontline workers, emergency responders, and community-based organisations, to ensure consistent, informed responses. Training should also be provided to coroners to improve the accuracy of heat-related death records.
Optimise planning during cooler months by reviewing and revising heat response plans, conducting comprehensive training sessions, and ensuring the replenishment of critical supplies.
Develop clear emergency protocols for communities to respond to heatwaves, with defined activation thresholds. Protocols should include detailed plans for vulnerable populations, particularly the unhoused, and incorporate predictive climate modelling for more accurate risk assessment.
Launch nationwide heat awareness campaigns, similar to flood messaging strategies, utilising media outlets, public signage, and online platforms with multilingual resources and community-specific messaging.
Leverage existing work done by Sweltering Cities and the Australian Red Cross to incorporate lived experiences of unhoused individuals to guide educational materials, ensuring they are practical, relevant, and accessible.
Rapidly increase the speed at which Australia is building public housing and establish cooling shelters in the interim.
Reassess the health risk to unhoused populations against the new National Climate Risk Assessment Determine responsibility if governments fail to provide year-round shelter or protection from climate against known health risks.
Data as a driver
He also urged improved data collection in Australia, and to learn from city authorities in New York and Phoenix in particular. Both work with their medical examiner (coroner) offices and emergency departments to improve awareness on heat deaths to improve heat death reporting, given the role of heat can be hidden by the presenting cause, such as an overdose or cardiovascular issue.
He said Phoenix, which experiences many days above 40 degrees Celsius in summer, has implemented thorough death investigations, including the use of detailed death certificates that capture the circumstances surrounding each heat-related death.
It also publishes a statistical analysis of how well their heat interventions are working (including comparisons to previous years) via its yearly Heat Response Plan.
Swain spent time in Phoenix with a community health outreach service, Circle the City, whose teams conducted general health checks on people who were homeless.
They investigated and treated cardiovascular stress, blood pressure, heart rate, dehydration and wound management — “largely from pavement burns due to the hot consistent 40-degree days. Burns on feet were also common…having access to shoes that could mitigate the heat risks were vital.”
The teams also provided medication refills for diabetes and antibiotics, that can be spoilt in heat and IV fluid replenishment.
Swain said Phoenix also deploys a wide variety of cooling interventions during a heatwave, with more than 120 venues to access shade and water.
A leading one, the Safe Outdoor Space (SOS), came about in response to extreme heat, but also after a coalition of business and property owners sued the city over an unsanctioned sprawling downtown homeless encampment, he said.
It contains 38 shipping containers that have been converted into homes for people aged over 55, all air-conditioned, solar-powered, and equipped with reserve power generators, as well an indoor recreation room with air-conditioning, showers and bathrooms.
Swain told HEAL2026 he was struck by the “amazing heat literacy” in Phoenix that was delivering different types of intervention for people who are homeless and demonstrating the need for a diversity of shelter and cooling options that reflect individual need and preference.
“If my power went out in my home, I’m not necessarily going to go to the public library or a cooling shelter,” he told HEAL2026. “I’ll probably go to the pub at the end of the road or a local club. Think places that are familiar,” he urged.
The city had cut heat deaths from a record 645 in 2024 to 460 in 2025, he said. But the El Niño summer just experienced has produced 462 heat deaths for 2026, with another 285 under investigation.
“So even with all these interventions that they’re putting in place, and they are the leading example of this, the heat is just getting to these extremities,” he said.
Australia’s response was improving, with the introduction of mobile cooling hubs, alliances, awareness training, and extreme weather protocols.
These steps are crucial to the short-term, he said. But the only way to “guarantee survival and to reduce this mortality” in a heating climate is climate adaptive housing.
Jon Swain: Interventions in Phoenix included heat literacy, shipping container shelters, cooling towers, university partnerships cooling shelters and health outreach
Follow our ongoing coverage of #HEAL2026.
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