As extreme heat blankets the globe from Phoenix to Athens, entrepreneurs are responding with an array of personal cooling devices that can help reduce health risks for everyone from infants to outdoor workers.
At Tokyo’s annual Extreme Heat Countermeasures Exhibition last week the focus was on how to keep workers in high-temperature environments, like construction sites and factories, cool and reduce the risk of heatstroke. As fossil fuel emissions accelerate climate change and with July set to become the world’s hottest month on record, there is growing appetite for the products from consumers and public institutions.
"We’re getting more orders from public facilities, like school gyms, to use our product,” said Hayato Ohashi, who works in sales at industrial fan manufacturer Earth Blower Japan. "The heat is just getting extraordinary in the last decade — it’s not something that will suddenly disappear next year.”