As Europe experiences increasingly intense heatwaves, keeping cool is no longer simply a matter of comfort. It is becoming a question of public health, social inequality, and policymaking. Some emphasise the environmental costs of air conditioning and rising electricity demand, while others point to its importance in protecting health and wellbeing. European institutions have largely avoided taking a binary position, even as the World Health Organization has urged governments to treat extreme heat as a public health crisis.
Malta provides an interesting case study. The use of air-conditioning in households is considerably higher than the European average, and is closer to the American figure: Indeed, according to Malta's 2021 Census, around 84% of occupied dwellings have air conditioning, up from 52% in 2011, reflecting both rising temperatures and changing living conditions.
At the same time, Malta's renewable energy share, though having accelerated rapidly in the past decade, is still one of the lowest in the European Union - it currently accounts for 17.2% of the country's total energy mix.
From a sociological perspective, we need to ask whether protection from excessive heat should increasingly be understood as a matter of social policy, given that access to cooling is shaped not only by climate but also by social and economic inequalities. The concept of social rights could be useful in this regard.
Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, sociologist T. H. Marshall argued that citizenship - erstwhile combining civil and political rights - had progressively evolved to include social rights such as education, healthcare, and social security. Amid today's lived experience of climate change, we may now ask whether protection from dangerous heat should increasingly form part of that conversation. Inclusive policymaking could thus consider whether everyone should enjoy access to adequate cooling and ventilation. Older persons, children, outdoor workers, people with chronic illnesses, and low-income households are often the most vulnerable to extreme heat, yet they may also face the greatest barriers to accessing effective cooling.
These inequalities can be observed in everyday life. In some workplaces, office-based employees work in air-conditioned environments, while cleaners, maintenance staff and other workers performing physically demanding or more precarious jobs may spend long periods in poorly ventilated spaces or outdoors. Similar questions arise in schools and other shared public buildings, where large numbers of students and staff work and learn in increasingly hot and humid conditions.
Such examples remind us that adaptation to climate change is also a matter of working conditions, equitable service provision, occupational health, and social justice. They also raise broader questions about public and private employers' responsibilities, including appropriate ventilation, cooling measures, access to drinking water, and cooling breaks for those exposed to extreme heat.
Adaptive policies and measures to protect people from increasingly dangerous temperatures should be seen as the implementation of social rights. At the same time, longer-term policy should gradually reduce the environmental impact of cooling through cleaner electricity generation, and other sustainable solutions developed across fields such as political economy, engineering, architecture, and urban planning. Here one hopes that Malta's official energy targets as an EU member state and a party to international agreements are obtained in practice. Immediate and longer-term policies should not take place at the exclusion of each other - to the contrary, we need smarter methods to reconcile such goals.
Thus, the debate about cooling is not simply about technology or electricity consumption. It is also about inequality, citizenship and the responsibilities of the state in a warming world. Sociology reminds us that climate change is experienced through everyday life, and that effective policy should place people's lived experiences alongside environmental and economic considerations. In a warming world, the politics of cooling is becoming inseparable from the politics of social justice.
Michael Briguglio is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta
www.michaelbriguglio.com