Abstract
Human geography scholarship understands extreme heat as socially produced and politically mediated. However, dominant notions of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation fail to capture heat-related harm as predictable and institutionally tolerated. This paper conceptualizes geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice to foreground how extreme heat is governed through differential exposure and thresholds of acceptable loss. Extending debates on abandonment, thermal violence, and climate necropolitics, it shifts the analysis from descriptive vulnerability toward the political allocation of harm. It offers a new lexicon and methodologies for sensing sacrifice and weathering and concludes with hopeful thermopolitics as a justice-oriented praxis of redistribution, repair, and care.
Introduction
In October 2025, Singapore—the place from which I write and home to the world's third-largest petroleum refinery center—hosted its most recent Grand Prix. For the first time, the race was declared a Formula One (F1) Heat Hazard. Drivers were advised to wear cooling vests to cope with high humidity, >31 °C, and the physically demanding circuit (Straits Times 2025). Since the 2023 Grand Prix in Qatar, during which drivers experienced heat exhaustion and severe dehydration, cooling vests are seen as precautionary innovations (Benson 2023). The irony of this moment is difficult to ignore: high-emission F1 drivers shielded by cutting-edge cooling technologies, while migrant workers who set up the track and clean up after the race (Lo 2023) remain largely unprotected (e.g., Zhu and Yuan 2023; Furszyfer del Rio et al. 2024; Sharp, Sadliwala, and Al-Shammari 2024; Tang 2025; Xu et al. 2025). Heat here is neither accidental nor evenly distributed; it is managed, allocated, and endured along starkly unequal lines.
Over the past decade, human geography and other social science scholarship have made substantial progress in theorizing extreme heat as a socially produced and politically mediated phenomenon. Work on heat insecurities and thermal violence has challenged biophysical framings of heat as a neutral hazard and instead underscored how intersecting vulnerabilities and inequalities are maintained (e.g., Hamstead 2024; Boni et al. 2025; Robinson 2025; Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2025). Despite these advances, dominant analytical approaches often struggle to scrutinize contexts in which heat-related harm is foreseeable, recurrent, and institutionally tolerated. Too often, attention remains focused on who is vulnerable and what embodied experiences are concealed, rather than on how endurance itself is managed, normalized, and demanded. As a result, the political rationalities through which some lives are tacitly expected to withstand extreme heat remain underexplored.
This paper argues that addressing this gap requires a conceptual shift. It advances the notion of geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice to interrogate how extreme heat is governed through differential exposure, foreknowledge, and thresholds of acceptable loss. Rather than treating heat harms as failures of adaptation or care, sacrifice foregrounds the active political work through which certain bodies are positioned to absorb heat so that others may remain protected and productive. Following a critical review of scholarship on abandonment, thermopolitical violence, and climate necropolitics, the paper develops this concept alongside a new lexicon for thermally sacrificed bodies to capture sanctioned endurance, infrastructured survival, and refusals of sacrifice. It then proposes a set of methodologies for sensing sacrifice and weathering across scales, from embodied heat labor to policy thresholds. The paper concludes by advancing hopeful thermopolitics as a justice-oriented praxis for human geography, where reducing sacrificial exposure replaces adaptive capacity as the benchmark for an effective response. This redefines good heat governance not by how well bodies endure, but by how far the need for endurance itself is lessened through redistribution, repair, and care.
Reframing Heat: From Hazard to Climate Necropolitics
Extreme heat is no longer to be conceptualized as merely a meteorological hazard but a pervasive and unevenly distributed form of embodied harm. It fuses vulnerability, infrastructures, inequalities, governance, labor, atmospheres, and violence into a complex phenomenon, in material, socio-technical, political, and corporeal ways (Oppermann et al. 2018; Guardaro et al. 2022; Lim et al. 2022; Hamstead 2023; Kaika et al. 2023; Chamayou 2025; Robinson 2025; Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2025). The ensuing co-produced atmospheric inequity (Colucci, Vecellio, and Allen 2023a) disproportionally afflicts lower-income populations and multifariously disadvantaged individuals. To begin, I trace relevant literature in human geography and allied disciplines that engages with key aspects of critical heat discourses, starting with the inadequacy of hazard narratives and proceeding to layers of intensified harm, from abandonment to thermopolitical violence and climate necropolitics.
Heat as Meteorological Hazard
Critical Heat Studies, pioneered by Hamstead (2023, 2024), rejects predominantly physical framings of dangerous temperatures. It demonstrates how thermal measurements and heat management tend to be technocratic, depoliticized, and ahistorical. Comprehension of and solutions to extreme heat through the lens of instrumental records, meteorological symbols, simulations, and top-down heat risk maps is partial at best. Such approaches, as Tschakert and Karthikeyan (2025) argue, obscure structural dimensions of heat inequality, embedded in abstract knowledge governance and often entwined with “imperial, colonial and military roots” (Hamstead 2024, 536).
Meteorological hazard discourses silence and make invisible the tangible thermal insecurities of everyday encounters with heat. Likewise, heat discourses foregrounding technological challenges eclipse thermopolitical arrangements of exclusion and misrecognition. Besides flattening corporeal knowledge and social-spatial inequalities, such narratives obfuscate violence, often institutionally sanctioned and enacted via the social engineering of housing, food, and energy precarity. Practices of marginalization, embedded in bureaucratic heat hazard plans for built environments, further invalidate the lived reality of unevenly distributed, embodied harm and the structural vulnerabilities that constitute precarious existences (Hamstead 2024; Boni et al. 2025).
Therefore, critical scholarship on extreme heat requires new scalar sensitivities that span the spectrum from the intimacy of sweat-soaked skin to the structural violence of factory labor, energy grids, and zoning maps. Besides gradients of visibility, from blatant absences in official data and risk indices to visceral experiences of heat exhaustion, this sharpened scalar lens attends to intersectional geographies to reveal how interlocking inequalities (i.e., race, gender, age, disability, class, ethnicity, religion, legal and marital status, and more) shape who overheats and who cools (Tschakert et al. 2025a). It also scrutinizes layered trajectories and escalations of harm, governed by national policy and planning and global energy regimes.
Abandonment
Critical human geography scholarship on climate change adaptation increasingly focuses on how scarcity, non-recognition, and abandonment engender colonial, racial, gendered, and disability-inflected suffering. Analytically, this does not necessarily mean leaping to the life-death binary but allows for scrutinizing diverse states of exclusion, omission, cruelty, and slow violence (Nixon 2011; Davies 2022). They can all lead to being harmed, wounded, injured, or maimed (DeBoom 2021; Davies, Isakjee, and Obradovic-Wochnik 2026).
More so than sheer neglect, abandonment is enacted upon purportedly undeservingly people and spaces. This often occurs through state absence and renunciation of investment or care that lead to “process[es] of deprivation, abdication and exposure” and to “becoming abandoned” as an affective, relational, and lived experience (Leshem 2017, 625). The same sacrificial logic is visible in climate adaptation when convenient absence, violent inaction, or omission oscillates with states’ hyper-action, brutal presence, and ommission in cycles of dispossession (Henrique and Tschakert 2021). Such work aligns with parallel calls in research on abandonment as a normalized practice, in cases of perceived state abandonment under neoliberal, individualized resilience imperatives (O'Grady and Shaw 2023) or when harm is predictable, unevenly distributed, and spatially imbricated in thermal governance (Chang 2024). By extension, thermopolitical governance does more than fail to cool: it enacts abandonment through systemic disregard, spatial erasure, infrastructural decay, and juridical exclusion or withdrawal.
Calling out such omissions and structural injustices in climate solutions is now a crucial pillar of climate justice scholarship, which scrutinizes precarity and privilege (Rice, Long, and Levenda 2022). This entails probing which lives are marked for abandonment and fall through the cracks, and which others are deemed worthy of protection, care, and rescue as a privilege of political and infrastructural legibility. Despite earlier attempts at “rescue geography,” examining vanishing places and memories (Jones and Evans, 2012), this line of inquiry is yet to gain traction in geographical analyses on climatic extremes. Drawing on emerging insights from adaptation and disability studies (Stein et al. 2024), such analyses of thermopolitical thresholds deserve critical attention as they reveal bodies to be protected versus those left to endure or perish. This, however, must not discount the agency of people enduring lives in “zones of abandonment” where the systematic withdrawal of care is increasingly normalized and integral to the biopolitical apparatus (Leshem 2017).
Thermal Violence
This slippery slope between neglect, known exposure, and harm represents an opportunity to bring recent insights on thermopolitics and thermal violence into conversation with scholarship on emerging climate necropolitics. Chamayou (2025) loosely defines thermopolitics as clashes between government discourse, abolitionist trade union demands, managerial regulatory standards, and conflict over temperatures and thermo-tolerance thresholds. These tensions play out in controversies over heat stress indices reliant on wet-bulb temperature that can be traced back to labor conditions in mines and weaving industries in the early twentieth century (ibid.). Starosielski (2021) frames thermal violence as a mechanism of power through which exposure to hot (and cold) is weaponized to control and hurt, thereby shaping social hierarchies. Despite the obvious scholarly attraction around contestation and the complex materialities involved, thermopolitics and thermal violence have only recently emerged as subjects of geographical interest.
A focus on “thermopower”—the power to manipulate and mediate temperatures (Starosielski 2018, 2021)—is crucial here. Insights into thermal violence and governance (Robinson 2025) enable us to discern how such sway is enacted. Sweat boxes, as colonial punishments imposed on Indigenous populations or on plantations, are good examples, as is the removal of thermal autonomy to protect oneself, as witnessed among indebted kiln workers and indoor garment workers in Cambodia (Parsons 2021; Parsons et al. 2025). Similarities are evident in prisons, where heat and cold are used as a lethal mechanism to discipline and chastise, for instance, in Russia and the United States (Colucci, Vecellio, and Allen 2023b).
Equally relevant to thermoviolence is the role of capitalist and neoliberal logics in individualizing heat resilience. The eco-modernist proliferation of air-conditioning as a project of nation building in Singapore is striking (McNeill 2019), especially given its re-appropriation of “tropicality” through post-colonial environmental engineering. A different twist emerges from heat guidelines for high-risk populations as witnessed in Western Australia. There, the Department of Health’s advice 1 for people experiencing homelessness is to “[d]rink plenty of water throughout the day,” “[w]ear lightweight clothing,” and “[u]se sunscreen and a hat during the day,” with no acknowledgement of the structural inequities that cause precarious lives. The misrecognition of embodied heat events, the trivializing of people's suffering, and the obfuscation of adaptive actions in state-driven heat action plans are all forms of thermal violence (Robinson 2025).
Climate Necropolitics
There is only a fine line between thermopolitical violence that condemns certain populations to disproportionate thermal suffering on the one hand and climate necropolitics on the other. The latter builds on Mbembe's (2003, 11) notion of necropolitics, described as “the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”. It foregrounds how state-driven climate governance produces uneven geographies of life and death (DeBoom 2021). So far, it is mainly documented in the realm of violent extractivism for low-carbon and green energy transitions, where it lays bare the mechanics of climate change-related violence to dispossess (Dunlap and Laratte 2022; Shokrgozar, Remme, and Stock 2024; DeBoom 2021). In other words, exposure to both climate hazards and so-called climate solutions is not an accidental outcome of our warming planet but a structured regime of disposability. Certain populations, especially poor, racialized, Indigenous, and other disenfranchised denizens, are made to live and die in death-worlds shaped by labor extraction, displacement, and environmental destruction, “in the name of planetary salvation” elsewhere (DeBoom 2021, 903).
Accordingly, climate necropolitics and necropolitical violence in the Anthropocene must no longer be understood as a collateral effect. Rather, they function as a strategic, multi-scalar, and politically organized regime to legitimize managed abandonment, sacrificial logics, and the elimination of expendable and disposable populations and life ways (the “living dead” and “death-in-life,” Mbembe 2003). As such, climate necropolitics aligns with human geography scholarship on the spatiality of climate coloniality, given its disproportional yet knowable suffering among historically marginalized populations (DeBoom 2022; Sultana 2022a, 2022b; Resurrección 2024). Undeniably, it mirrors structural violence in broader contexts such as toxic pollution (Davies 2018, 2022; Tyner 2019; Peters, Clare, and Davies 2025).
So far, critical geographic work that adopts an explicit necropolitical framing specific to extreme heat is scarce, with some notable exceptions. While the advice by Peters, Clare, and Davies (2025, 1) to avoid “necro-everything” is warranted, heat-related death-worlds and thermo-necropolitical sensibilities do merit spatial and relational attention. De León's (2015) analysis of calculated abandonment along the migrant trail in the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and the United States provides a powerful illustration of how the US state policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, thermal suffering, and slow attrition converge into killing fields. The “desert hybrid collective,” as De León argues, functions as the vector of necropolitical governance: the extreme desert heat melds with the unforgiving terrain, scavenging animals, smugglers and robbers, and the corporeal intensity of dehydration, exhaustion, and collapse experienced by expendable bodies. Thus, the deaths of migrants forced into lethal desert crossings are to be understood as a deliberate, state-sanctioned yet invisibilized necropolitical border enforcement strategy.
Other examples of climate necropolitics stem from the intersection of thermal inequities and carceral climatology. In white supremist contexts where space-as-shelter, active indifference, racial capitalism, and prison architecture are designed to kill and let die, the death of mostly non-white imprisoned bodies is considered “fiscally responsible” (Colucci, Vecellio, and Allen 2023b, 649). Necropolitical conditions can also proliferate in urban settings. Evidence from Paris reveals how thermopolitical abandonment condemns immigrant residents to existences of “the living dead,” triggered by air pollution, limited access to healthcare, and sub-standard living arrangements (de Freitas Sampaio and Pauvret 2026).
Sacrificial Logics
While necropolitics reveals the spatial production of death-worlds, a focus on sacrifice is necessary to interrogate how predictable harm becomes morally justified, administratively routinized, and politically accepted. This, as I will argue, is the next level of escalation beyond abandonment, the normalization of heat events, and accumulated, attritional harm over time. A critical lens focused on sacrificial logics makes it possible to re-politicize resilience discourses, climate risk management, and metrics for adaptation limits, by explicitly attending to calculated exposure, knowledge of at-risk groups, anticipated threshold exceedance, and the political acceptance of loss (i.e., “this is necessary”). In the context of thermal governance, the question to ask is: whose lives are rendered disposable, and how do these expendable bodies (human and non-human) become shock absorbers or buffers for the prosperity or survival of others? These others are not limited to people but encompass economies, infrastructures, net-zero visions, and other climate futures.
Over the past decade, critical geographical scholarship has witnessed an analytical shift from focusing on sacrifice zones as bounded territorialities of harm to examining sacrifice people and bodies as sites of environmental, climatic, political, and affective violence (Barusevicius et al. 2025). This reframing reflects a broader ontological turn in the discipline, one that privileges the embodied, relational, and intersectional dimensions of power, harm, and spatial justice. While not yet focused on heat per se, the emerging scholarship on climate necropolitics predicts a more explicit emphasis on heat-sacrificed bodies.
Sacrifice Zones
The term sacrifice zone emerged in U.S. environmental discourse in the 1970s. It was initially used to describe landscapes deemed expendable and designated for extractive industries, nuclear testing, or intensive livestock operations, mostly on Indigenous lands (Juskus 2023). By the 1980s and 1990s, environmental justice scholars and activists usurped the term to critique the racialized, classed, and gendered geographies of deliberate toxic exposure or militarized industrialization, and their disproportionate health and socio-economic burdens on low-income, minority populations, for example, in Louisiana's “Cancer Alley” (Bullard 1990; Checker 2007).
Today, sacrifice zones extend beyond the traditional and spatially delineated notion of dumping on fenceline communities (Klein 2014; Farrier 2019; De Bruyn 2023). Increasingly, the concept is employed to reveal a fluid and porous social relationality in the form of “slow sacrifice” (Juskus 2023). However, unlike slow violence and its attritional harm over time, couched in a politics of neglect, sacrifice occurs as uneven, as intentional, planned, and normalized “controlled ruination” of places and human and non-human entities (Cavalcanti and Lima 2025, 1). The inquisitive lens has also shifted to oceans, cities, labs, and zoos (Miller 2023) and cultural and spiritual life/death spaces (Juskus 2023).
In today's climate emergency, “we are all in the sacrifice zone now” (Klein 2014, 315), and this zone is unremittingly dispersing (Farrier 2019). Yet, the uneven spatial violence persists as “condemned places” remain homes to “whole subsets of humanity categorised as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable” (Klein 2014, 310). However, this sacrificial violence not only permeates the life cycle of fossil fuels. Gonzalez (2021) shows how international climate law and the Paris Agreement itself fail to penalize fossil fuel extraction while touting false climate solutions.
So far, critical scholarship on climate sacrifice zones and climate necropolitics has primarily focused on green extractivism for decarbonization (e.g., wind and solar) in the Global South (Dunlap 2018; Bouzarovski 2022; Dunlap and Laratte 2022; Dunlap and Riquito 2023; Tornel 2024). Its logic of climate coloniality seems clear: climate sacrifice zones require necropolitical discourses of othering that narrate certain lands and their inhabitants as surplus and waste. The extractive sacrifice legitimizes clean energy infrastructure and thermoregulated lives elsewhere. In the broader context of climate and carbon capitalism, such sacrifice enables the normalization of indifference to disproportionate destruction and suffering (Gonzalez 2021) and the justification of moralized trade-offs.
The time is ripe, De Bruyn (2023) argues, to expose how capitalist violence is enacted upon the air and atmosphere. A good example is Jorritsma's (2023) decolonial attempt to trace urban sacrifice zones under climate change. It employs the logic of “ghosting,” best understood as a form of hauntology (Farrier 2019) in peripheral, forsaken spaces seeped in colonial and racial logics and politics of dispossession. “Ghosting” functions as a sacrificial veil that separates spaces of being (valued, preserved, rescued) from spaces of non-being (expendable, sacrificed, quasi-dead), examined through uncanny warmth descending upon New York. Such listening for spectral traces of sacrifice renders heat as spatially, materially, and relationally distributed, and ultimately also inscribed on bodies.
Sacrificed Peoples and Bodies
Using climatic harm as inscribed on human and non-human flesh offers a powerful anchor point for sharpening the analytical pivot in human geography and relevant adjacent fields: it propels us to zoom in on diversely situated people, bodies, and their precarious lives. This pivot responds to recurrent critiques of spatial abstraction in climate studies: the tendency to map sacrifice territorially without adequately attending to the lived, embodied, and relational experiences of those who endure slow, cumulative, and sacrificial violence.
As demonstrated in scholarship on green extractivism and climate colonialism, sacrifice zones are rarely (if ever) empty wastelands but home to communities about to be sacrificed, expandable, abandoned people and more-than-human bodies (Ipsen and McMillan Lequieu 2025). These are sub-altern others, racialized minorities, and Indigenous Peoples rendered inferior, undeserving, disposable and hence earmarked for slow social death or identified as targets for “improvement” (Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Tornel 2024; Shokrgozar et al. 2024). Such selective sacrifice below the “abyssal line” (de Sousa Santos 2015), differentiating between those deemed fully human and others constructed as less human, renders the racialized exclusion and disposability of the latter as “socially and legally acceptable” (Sundberg 2008).
As feminist geographers, as well as disability, postcolonial, critical race, and environmental humanities scholars have underscored, the body becomes both a target and a witness. In the context of climatic hazards, including extreme heat, the body serves as a thermopolitical surface upon which violence is enacted, resisted, and remembered. Consequently, climatic (as well as broader environmental) harms are not merely inflicted upon a place or communities, but are metabolized by bodies, saturating muscles, limbs, lungs, everyday routines, and the practices of survival.
Three complementary insights have advanced human geography scholarship on embodiment and the climate crisis. Firstly, environmental and climatic injury is inseparable from ableism, biopolitics, and gendered labor as sacrifice is layered onto bodies already made precarious at the intersections of gender, race, class, (dis)ability, age, and indigeneity (Anguelovski et al. 2020; Nichols and Del Casino 2021; Zaragocin and Caretta 2021; Amorim-Maia et al. 2022; Rice, Long, and Levenda 2022; Chennault and Sutton 2023; Deivanayagam et al. 2023; Gay-Antaki 2023; Vasudevan et al. 2023; McKane et al. 2024; Weatherill 2024). For instance, as part of the slow settler-colonial violence in Western Australia, profit-driven absconding in the construction sector and structures of expendability literally suffocate residents with physical, mental, and/or emotional disabilities, many of whom juggle diverse intersecting inequalities and overheating in public housing or overcrowded spaces (Tschakert et al. 2025a, 2025b).
Secondly, uneven exposure to and endurance of climatic harms produce sacrificial bodies that are left to weather. Through the policy and media vernacular of “weathering,” the political allocation of risk is converted into individual or community capacity for endurance. Yet, for some, the expectation to “simply weather” is a dangerous twist in re-allocating responsibility and commanding resilient subjects. For instance, for Hamilton, Zettel, and Neimanis (2021) and Neimanis and Hamilton (2018), weathering encapsulates the everyday surviving of struggling bodies in the face of systemic and structural violence and climate coloniality. This ranges from practices of racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, dispossession, and exclusionary climate solutions (Sultana 2022a) to “the total atmospheres that different bodies are made to bear” (Hamilton, Zettel, and Neimanis 2021, 237). The latter draws upon the notion of “the total climate” (Sharpe 2016), as the total subjugation of black (and other) bodies made or to be made dispensable, simultaneously social, political, and more-than-meteorological.
Weathering as embodied wear, hence, sits comfortably alongside environmental justice scholarship that examines and refutes expendability (Pellow 2016; Rice, Long, and Levenda 2022; McKane et al. 2024), a terrain akin to conceptualizations of sacrifice people and resistance. However, it must not be conflated with resilience but rather seen as an ethics of exposure, a politics of shelter, and a situated and relational practice, given that bodies, infrastructures, atmospheres, and political decisions are all mutually implicated: [W]eathering means learning to live with the changing conditions of rainfall, drought, heat, thaw and storm as never separable from the ‘total climate’ of social, political and cultural existence of bodies. This includes anti-blackness, but also, we suggest, coloniality, misogyny and the resourcing and thingafication of other bodies—poor, queer, non-human, disabled. (Neimanis and Hamilton 2018, 82)
The third vital geographical contribution to the shift in focus from sacrifice spaces to sacrifice bodies is embodied infrastructures and infrastructural bodies. Simone's (2004) seminal work on people as infrastructure in post-apartheid Johannesburg illustrated how people themselves filled the gaps in social services the city failed to provide, through improvised and relational practices such as borrowing, hustling, and sharing. Scholarship in human geography expands this domain by linking infrastructural assemblages to urban materiality. This embodied lens foregrounds the blending of formal and informal systems (McFarlane 2011; McFarlane and Silver 2017), urban informality, citizenship, and liminal infrastructures (Roy 2005; Truelove 2021), urban togetherness and lively, affective infrastructure (Amin 2014), and more (e.g., Lesutis 2023; Fredericks 2025). Insights into shadow infrastructures of care (Power et al. 2022; Olivier et al. 2025) further exemplify how people as infrastructure operate as informal networks to compensate for abandonment, state neglect, and denial of care, even in affluent countries.
However, such intimate infrastructure and everyday labor mask the bodily exhaustion, precarity, and entrapment at work. They often cover gendered, classed, and racialized slow sacrifice to counteract structural neglect, expendability, and invisibilization that come with being taken for granted and unpaid when toiling as everyday bridges. Such masking is undone, for example, by scrutinizing how water is secured for household needs (Truelove and Ruszczyk 2022) or when infrastructure bodies are sacrificed for ventilation and waste disposal, such as in lethal (necro)resettlements in Delhi and Mumbai (Jha 2023). As Lesutis and Kaika (2024) argue, bodies become (not are) infrastructure and thereby tend to be violently “infrastructured” into and exploited in precarious surplus value production that repeatedly engenders corporeal harm.
Theorizing Geographies of Thermopolitical Sacrifice
The scholarly advances at the nexus of abandonment, thermopolitical struggles, and heat-sacrificed bodies, as reviewed above, are promising. However, how do they align with human geographies of critical heat studies? While a concrete debate is yet to emerge, the time is right to theorize what geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice might entail, conceptually and analytically. Much could be speculated about who is sacrificed, by whom, and for what, for instance, when interrogating how extreme urban heat unmasks embodied infrastructuring. Less well explored is the suitability of current labels for scrutinizing thermopolitical sacrifice; I will argue that a new lexicon is needed to provide affective, ethical, and political traction. This is a first attempt.
Conceptual and Analytical Advances
Conceptually, the geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice I envision foreground power, politics, and scale. They reframe extreme heat not as a failure of care or an external hazard unevenly distributed across populations but as a mode of governing thermal life through differential exposure and endurance. The concept foregrounds thermopolitics (see Chamayou 2025), best understood as how heat, bodies, infrastructures, and thresholds are assembled to sustain particular social, economic, and climatic futures. In contrast to approaches that center vulnerability, exposure, or resilience, thermopolitical sacrifice insists that endurance itself is politically organized: some lives are expected to absorb heat so that others may remain productive, mobile, and cool. Sacrifice thus names harm as well as the moral and political rationalities through which harm becomes tolerable, necessary, or invisible.
Importantly, thermopolitical sacrifice is not reducible to neglect or abandonment. While abandonment emphasizes withdrawal and omission, an explicit focus on sacrifice sees heat exposure as a form of anticipatory governance rather than accidental or residual: harm is foreseen, modelled, and calibrated through planning instruments, labor regulations, public-health thresholds, and adaptation pathways. This conceptual move renders heat governance legible as a politics of valuation, in which lives are differentially weighted across time, space, and social difference. In doing so, geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice bridge biopolitical management of life with necropolitical toleration of loss, without collapsing one into the other. Figure 1 illustrates how thermopolitical sacrifice operates.
Conceptualization of Thermopolitical Sacrifice as an Emergent Mode of Climate Governance in Which Extreme Heat Is Managed Through Differential Exposure.
Analytically, geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice are worthwhile for critical human geography. They shift the analysis away from vulnerability as a descriptive condition toward the thermopolitical allocation of harm. This makes it possible to examine heat governance as a moral economy in which endurance, acclimatization, and informal coping are tacitly exchanged for economic continuity, urban density, and energy-intensive cooling for others. More specifically, this analytical shift encompasses three advances.
First, moving away from the prevailing attention on typical at-risk groups or vulnerable populations, which inevitably homogenizes and flattens intersectional inequalities (e.g., the elderly, the homeless, those with medical conditions, etc., see Tschakert et al. 2025a), opens vital space to expose how precarity is produced through thermopolitical decision-making. This reorientation draws attention to the body as a thermal interface: there, decision making collides with climatic hazards, labor, and shelter, and where harm becomes metabolic, intimate, and cumulative. It also challenges thresholds that typically shape extreme heat governance (e.g., wet-bulb limits, occupational standards, cooling center activation, and mortality baselines); they are not neutral safety markers but lines of acceptable loss. These lines organize exposure across scales, from the body to neighborhoods to the state, and signal when harm becomes politically tolerable. Therefore, the analytical lens of sacrifice brings to the fore moral rather than scientific or industry thresholds.
Second, thermopolitical sacrifice reframes heat-related harm not only as institutionally sanctioned violence (see Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2025) but as sanctioned endurance. As such, the analytical focus extends accounts of climatic harm as slow violence, including that caused by excessive heat. Where slow violence captures the attritional and temporally dispersed character of heat-related suffering, sacrifice foregrounds the moment at which harm is known, anticipated, and permitted to proceed. Sacrifice is authorized, given that high-risk groups are known, the heat threshold exceedance can be modelled, and heat suffering and deaths in particularly hot environments are foreseeable.
This then makes it possible to sharpen the scholarly scope on sacrificial thermal subjects whose heat suffering is rendered predictable, replaceable, and politically quiet (e.g., informal, migrant, outdoor workers, those working in the gig economy, socio-economically deprived residents in poorly cooled public housing, people living with physical and mental disabilities, and more-than-human denizens that falter, collapse, or explode in heat events). Those who sacrifice can rarely be narrowed down to a single actor and certainly not one who proclaims, “we will sacrifice these people.” Rather, our analytical gaze needs to target layered decision-making assemblages that have the capacity to anticipate and accept differential heat-health harm. These include adaptation policy makers, energy regulators, urban planners, zoning authorities, construction lobbies, and those who design public health advisories from the luxury of their air-conditioned offices.
Third, this analysis makes visible the future-oriented dimensions of heat governance alongside harm in the present. Climate adaptation, resilience planning, infrastructural thermal design, and net-zero transitions are increasingly organized around differential valuations of life, comfort, dignity, and survival in a warming world. This is because they rely on the partial spending of certain lives in the present, namely through intensified labor regimes and compromised health conditions. They also count on accelerated weathering and physiological deterioration of certain populations that are the result of ongoing, structural racism and socio-economic disenfranchisement (Geronimus 2020).
Such embodied wear, coupled with curtailed life expectancies among sacrificed bodies, is made morally justifiable (e.g., “they are used to the heat” or “they choose to work even when it is so hot”). This sacrificial logic, in turn, buffers and secures livable thermal futures for others, those who have access to and can afford cooled privilege (e.g., “we can’t protect everyone” or “resilience efforts deserve rescue”). It also ensures that life-as-usual can continue: economic growth, urban density, productivity, and energy-intensive industries and lifestyles. Geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice thus illuminate how contemporary climate responses redistribute not only risk, but time, vitality, and survival itself.
Cross-Scalar Dynamics
Thermopolitical sacrifice operates through nested configurations that extend from the planetary to the individual body. Although greenhouse gas emissions, global annual temperature increases, and migrant labor flows are traceable at the highest spatial level, smart cities, green infrastructure, and digital urban climate twins insist on heat-resilient futures. Yet, the sacrifice of bodies that remain uncooled and unrecognized is rendered invisible, out of sight or somebody else's responsibility, even when occupational safety laws, heat standards, and welfare programs are enshrined in national policy (Park, Pankratz, and Behrer 2021; Dean and McCallum 2025). Municipal decision-making in urban planning, zoning, green spaces, and cooling infrastructure has repeatedly led to spatially uneven heat-mitigation outcomes. Enforcement gaps at the institutional level, such as in workplace protection regulations and housing codes, coexist with increasingly sophisticated forecasting tools and heat-health advisories that nonetheless lack enforceable protection.
As a result, disproportionally exposed bodies are inevitably embroiled in the cross-scalar machinations of heat governance. They undercut coping strategies and metabolic functioning, while the cooling gap, like the energy gap, exposes longstanding geographies of exclusion. These forms of selective heat suffering are not oversights in urban planning and healthcare services; they are systemic upshots of thermopolitical regimes. Furthermore, when cooling becomes commodified, securitized, and featured in eco-modernized visions for urban sustainability (e.g., cooling corridors designed around high-value real estate or greening efforts that bypass informal settlements), sacrificial thermal geographies creep in. Evidence of predictable thermopolitical casualties from cities around the world is growing, from Phoenix (Guardaro et al. 2022) to Perth (Tschakert et al. 2025a, 2025b) and from Barcelona (Amorim-Maia et al. 2023; Kotsila et al. 2025) to Bangkok (Marks and Connell 2024) and Abu Dhabi (Furszyfer del Rio et al. 2024).
New Lexica
Advancing critical geographies of heat requires a new lexicon for thermally sacrificed bodies that moves beyond metaphor and descriptive vulnerability. Terms such as frontline exposure, resilience, and adaptation limits are pervasive in scholarship on climate adaptation, yet they fall short in elucidating relations, responsibilities, and trade-offs. This is because they tend to obscure drivers of precarity, conflate sacrifice with virtue, and conceal the calculated and relational nature of heat governance. Moreover, terms typically used in heat action planning (e.g., heat vulnerability, heat stress, and resilience to heat) conceal agency by failing to inquire what actions are taken (or not) and what works for whom. They also depersonalize bodies via abstract risk categories (e.g., high-risk groups) while moralizing endurance through resilience discourses that emphasize strength and heroic coping.
In their place, I propose an emerging vocabulary that foregrounds foreknowledge, acceptable loss, and the embodied labor through which sacrifice is enacted. This lexicon does not simply rename harm; it renders visible the thermopolitical arrangements through which endurance is demanded, sacrifice is normalized, and better weathering becomes thinkable as a collective alternative. It also reorients analysis toward more equitable futures by making heat governance legible as a site of political choice, ethical responsibility, and hopeful thermo-politics. Table 1 presents such a working lexicon for analyzing geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice. It is intended to be generative, not exhaustive.
A Starter Lexicon for Geographies of Thermopolitical Sacrifice.
A sceptical reader may argue that thermo-political sacrifice merely renames vulnerability (or lack of resilience). I would reject such a claim. Vulnerability describes uneven susceptibility to harm; thermopolitical sacrifice interrogates the political conditions under which such susceptibility is produced, anticipated, and rendered acceptable. In contexts of extreme heat, harms are known and recurrent yet continue to be tolerated through thresholds that define acceptable loss. Where vulnerability frameworks identify who is exposed, sacrifice foregrounds how exposure is relationally organized and morally justified. Thermo-political sacrifice thus extends, rather than duplicates, vulnerability by rendering visible the governance rationalities that transform predictable harm into sanctioned endurance.
Finally, it can be argued that advancing scholarship on extreme heat also requires lexicon-building as a method. Lexica matter because they shape what can be governed, contested, and repaired. Such practice foregrounds analytical shifts from individualized vulnerability to relational exposure, and from abstract heat metrics to making visible the affective and temporal labor of weathering. It also opens space for anti-sacrificial imaginaries that refuse endurance as virtue and reposition thermal livability as a collective ethical responsibility. Lexicon-building, hence, becomes a methodological intervention aimed at honoring bodies and re-politicizing heat futures by contesting and resisting heated climate necropolitics. Some core concepts for such a project, included in Table 1 (e.g., better weathering and ecologies of thermal care), are clarified later. I will turn next to the ingredients of such methodologies, before concluding with hopeful thermopolitics.
Methodologies for Sensing Heat Sacrifice and Survival
Geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice require methodologies capable of detecting not only uneven heat exposure but the political work that renders endurance acceptable. This means the thresholds, standards, infrastructures, moral economies, and affective atmospheres through which some bodies are positioned to bear heat for others. This is a challenge, amplified by the limits of dominant vocabularies and technocratic, disembodied metrics such as heat vulnerability indices. Lexicon-building, as argued above, functions as a method: it reorients inquiry from such abstract indices to the affective and temporal labor of weathering, while opening analytic space for weathering better.
Methodological Toolkit
What follows is a deliberatively selective portfolio of creative, caring approaches that operationalize these lexica across scales. I build on methodological advances in critical heat studies and feminist, participatory, and embodied approaches to expose corporeal experiences as counter-hegemonic forms of knowing. Practices for sensing and witnessing thermopolitical sacrifice that are attuned to embodiment, power, and place are central to this aim. Inspiration comes from feminist, decolonial, black, Indigenous, queer, and crip justice-oriented practices committed to dignity, refusal, and co-production. It is precisely such fish-eye epistemologies and “submerged perspectives” (Gómez-Barris 2017, 61, 103) that engender pockets of radical or paradoxical hope (Cassegård and Thörn 2018).
Methodologies for subaltern sensing position the sensing body as a site of inquiry and harm as well as resistance (Ahmed 2004). They are vital for teasing out the geographies of cooling and non-cooling (e.g., who has access to refuge, respite, and care? who is protected and who is excluded, blamed, or ignored?). They could also play a crucial role in scrutinizing what infrastructures of care emerge or are withheld (e.g., what kinds of solidarity, repair, and political recognition become possible? which are foreclosed, for whom, and how?).
Four methodological axes seem fit for purpose. Each is diagnostic of sacrifice, not exposure, designed to bring to the fore its specific dimensions and its possible undoing.
The first axis reveals corporeal, affective, and intersectional dimensions of thermopolitical sacrifice. Embodied ethnographies and participatory action research seem ideally suited to expose gendered, racialized, disabled, trans, aged, and infrastructurally neglected perspectives and “hard-to-reach” populations (e.g., rough sleepers). Intersectionality must be the core analytical tool for elucidating how corporeal heat experiences are differentially navigated (e.g., sleep interruptions, paralysis, entrapment, panic, metabolic breakdown). They can also expose hidden thermopolitical injuries (e.g., institutional abandonment due to the dismantling of disability support) and detect everyday rituals of survival.
Expanding from existing participatory heat methods such as culturally attuned thermal neighborhood maps (Guardaro et al. 2020) and heat diaries (Oppermann, Walker, and Brearley 2020), other approaches advance sensory storytelling such as truth-telling through disability (Tschakert et al. 2025b), counter-cartographic mapping that uncovers shadow places (Kaika et al. 2023), and ethical witnessing as a method and a refusal of abstraction or forgetting (De León 2015). Diaries could be enhanced by documenting infrastructured endurance and heat maintenance time-use. Participants would record micro-decisions (e.g., when to rest, where to seek shade), resource trade-offs (e.g., cooling vs. cost), bodily sensations (e.g., dizziness, nausea), and care obligations (e.g., cooling elders, children, animals). Short time-use modules would assess the invisible labor of thermal maintenance (e.g., queueing for water, searching for cool spaces), possibly complemented with the critical use of wearables to trace cumulative thermal attrition (e.g., heart rate, skin temperature), interpreted through personal narrations.
The second methodological axis focuses on the refusal of sacrifice. Analytically, refusal methods reveal the limits, fractures, and contestability of sacrificial arrangements. Scholarly insights indicate that contestation and resistance to abandonment and thermal necropolitics are never total or absolute (Jha 2023; de Freitas Sampaio and Pauvret 2026), and that radical urban heat governance (Kaika et al. 2023) can crack open productive spaces. Thermopolitical care is detectable via informal networks of cooling care and solidarity (DeBoom 2021; Jorritsma 2023) and analyses of repair and recovery grounded in climate, environmental, and disability justice (Mislán 2024; Lee and Han 2025).
Examples include geo-storytelling that serves as a counter-narrative of existential recovery, by defying subjugation and reclaiming sacrifice zones and their inhabitants as sacred spaces of belonging and dignity (Mislán 2024). Mapping shadow infrastructures of care reveals overlooked care practices while also supporting and amplifying them (Power et al. 2022; Olivier et al. 2025), for instance, by co-designing mutual-aid infrastructures (e.g., cool routes, safe resting places). Moreover, participatory action trials have experimented with commoning coolth strategies in which private homes become nodes for redistributing shade, shelter, and water (Mellick Lopes et al. 2018). Such approaches function as counter-sacrifice zones, reframing damaged places and bodies as sites of “enduring vitality,” also inspired by Indigenous ecologies (De Bruyn 2023, 1490).
Furthermore, I can envisage explicit “refusal archives” (e.g., timeline mapping of collective action, records of micro-practices interrupting sacrificial arrangements). Refusal of sacrifice and thermopolitical dissent could take shape through zines, co-authored outputs, or community screenings that story agency and refusal as politics, not maladaptation (e.g., labor slow-downs in heat, strategic non-compliance, collective claims-making).
The third methodological set focuses on more-than-human weathering to bare manifestations of climatic-affective atmospheres. Such atmospheres coalesce affective, meteorological, and airy qualities and hence require tracing flows and metabolisms across living and breathing entities (Verlie 2019). Existing approaches range from feminist “conspirational” and more-than-human witnessing of breath and breathlessness (Verlie and Neimanis 2023) to naming and tracing the heat-dead as counter-memory (De León 2015).
Equally insightful would be affective atmosphere mapping, to depict atmospheric injustice, affective heat gradients, and thermo-affective burden. By employing participatory affective heat maps, residents and workers could overlay neighborhood maps with sensations of dread, exhaustion, relief, shame, surveillance, and safety. This could be combined with short mobile audio notes (“heat moments”) and photo-elicitation to capture how thermal atmospheres shape mobility, sociability, and fear.
To operationalize ecologies of thermal care and multispecies thermal sacrifice, human geographers may trial multispecies heat witnessing. Following Taylor's (2024, 285) call for an environmentalism of the injured, such witnessing would entail multispecies attentiveness to entire ecologies of disablement, “a politics of ‘living with’”. This means sensing beyond humans, observing how trees, birds, insects, pets, and urban wildlife experience heat. I can also envision citizen science engagements with denizens made expendable in dominant heat discourses, by utilizing infrared photography of human and non-human heat-disabled ecologies (e.g., scorched flying foxes falling from trees, landscapes becoming desiccated, and people and pets overheating in cars). This should be coupled with community care protocols (water stations, shade micro-interventions) that are ethically attentive to nonhuman lives and human capacity.
Finally, sensing sacrifice requires methods that can move “upward” as well as “inward,” tracing how intimate heat harms are produced through institutional decisions. Critical engagements with tools such as heat exposure mapping, policy analysis, and institutional ethnography could expose how systematically higher heat stress in sacrifice zones is perpetuated, how calculations of risk and acceptable loss are inscribed in policy and public discourse, and how anticipated harms are rationalized and institutionalized.
Why not attempt a cross-scalar “sacrifice tracing,” in addition to urban heat and cooling modelling and critical analyses of heat action plans and heat-health advisories? This would entail tracking how a city's cooling future is assembled (e.g., green infrastructure, “smart” cooling corridors, net-zero trajectories). Institutional ethnography and actor-network tracing could follow decisions from global models to household bills, thereby uncovering who is earmarked to pay the thermal futures debt. Such sacrifice tracing could be juxtaposed with counter-scenarios workshops where residents articulate alternative, more equitable thermopolitical visions; or with feminist visualizations/participatory GIS (Kwan 2002), experiential cartography to capture micro-spatial harms (Rekacewicz et al. 2025), or counter-hegemonic heat mapping (Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2025). They all enable studying heat harm and sacrifice without reproducing their logics: they center those deemed disposable not as data points but as co-creators of knowledge, repair, and liveable futures.
Data Collection Protocol for Better Weathering
Taken together, these methodological axes invite translation into pragmatic yet theoretically grounded data collection capable of tracing sacrifice and refusal across diverse heat contexts. I propose a comparative data-collection protocol that aligns diagnostic methods with dominant heat-management discourses. For illustration (Figure 2), I use Singapore, Doha, and Delhi—three urban contexts that struggle with heat, beyond those more extensively studied in Europe, Australia, and the USA. This choice also allows me to link back to my opening vignette on F1 racing. Each site typifies a distinct thermopolitical trajectory that shapes who is expected to endure heat, how endurance is normalized, and how paths toward better weathering might look like. “Better weathering” (Hamilton, Zettel, and Neimanis 2021) encapsulates governing heat through redistributing thermal security. This makes the reduction of sacrificial exposure, rather than adaptive capacity, the benchmark of effective response.
An Illustrative Operationalization of Geographies of Thermopolitical Sacrifice, Situating Empirical Methods And Approximated Evidence Within a City’s Dominant Heat Survival Discourses. Based on Chang (2024), Furszyfer Del Rio et al. (2024), Ho, Chua, and Feng (2024), Molho (2025), Tschakert et al. (2025B), Xu et al. (2025), and Zhu and Yuan (2023).
Conclusion: Towards a Hopeful Thermopolitics
If urban heat is one of the defining injustices of the climate crisis, then reckoning with abandonment, violence, and sacrifice must be central to climate justice scholarship. Yet, naming thermopolitical sacrifice as outlined here is not an endpoint; it is an ethical beginning and a precondition for hopeful thermopolitics. Recognition must be accompanied by a relational praxis of repair and better weathering. At this crucial juncture, I see a challenge and opportunity for human geography scholarship to demonstrate critical intellectual leadership, rather than succumbing to naïve and potentially harmful rescue analyses.
Hopeful thermopolitics is a justice-oriented practice that rejects the inevitability of embodied sacrifice while treating thermal liveability as a collective ethical responsibility (Table 1). I propose three axes of such justice-oriented heat governance, best pictured as a thermopolitical project, building on the methodologies of witnessing sketched above.
First, abandonment and sacrifice are never total (Leshem 2017; Jha 2023). Hence, more attention is required to foreground adaptive improvisations and quiet acts of thermopolitical care that help organize thermal lives (Guardaro et al. 2022; Tschakert et al. 2025b). Low-tech cooling innovations show how surviving intimacies persist, including the sharing of mundane adaptive practices (Ferenčuhová 2022) for thermoregulating bodies (e.g., drinking buttermilk, using spray bottles). Practices of commoning coolth range from sharing fans and portable ACs to co-designing shaded walking paths, water refilling stations, and splash pads (Dufty 2022; Lim et al. 2022).
These practices are not only responses to heat. They are relational refusals of sacrifice itself. Thermopolitical infrastructures of care are “shadowy survivalist practices” (Olivier et al. 2025, 5), a “world-making practice” (Mellick Lopes et al. 2018, 51), grounded in interdependence and joined-up corporeal vulnerabilities. Even if repeatedly neglected by policy, they are spatial, corporeal, and radical lifelines for and among overheated bodies, human and non-human alike. Such meshworks of care have so far resided in the shadows of neoliberal, self-reliant resilience discourses that structurally and selectively abandon. To turn up the heat on thermopolitical sacrifice, they ought to be charted with their protagonists, to claim recognition and visibility and probe diverse visions of thermal futures.
The second pillar of the thermopolitical project, as I envision it, centers on resistance to thermal injustices. It is a condemnation of destructive logics of climate solutionism that inflict new harm on planetary lives, via terracide and exclusionary energy transitions (Shokrgozar, Remme, and Stock 2024; Tornel 2024). A just thermopolitics must resist ecological civilization tropes that justify exclusion, as DeBoom (2021) cautions, and technocratic fixes that mask new sacrificial calculations. Instead, resisting as collective bodies of infrastructural care may well serve as a direct opposition to the so-called “critical infrastructure” of ecomodernist climate salvation (e.g., fracking wells, hydroelectric mega-dams) (Lesutis and Kaika 2024).
Resisting then subverts violence by sustaining entangled lives rather than giving in to the capitalist logic of surplus bodies and dispensability. It provides a crucial opening for radical imaginaries and insurgent heat planning (Kaika et al. 2023; Tschakert and Karthikeyan 2025). From a geographic perspective, this requires judicious scalar attention, from spaces of bodily safety to heat injury as an engine for political mobilization. Insurgent heat planning must accommodate civic claims for thermal security, based on an ethic of indispensability (McKane et al. 2023), even if slow deaths (Berlant 2007), unseen suffering, and colonial erasures (Jorritsma 2023) are likely to persist.
The third pillar of a hopeful thermopolitics is grounded in repair and regeneration. Inspired by Black geographies of geo-storytelling in sacrifice zones (Mislán 2024), we can apprehend thermal repair work as “existential recovery.” “Staying in disaster” (i.e., thermal violence, climate necropolitics), as Mislán (2024) recommends, first requires recognizing how disasters are imposed on bodies and landscapes, never natural events; and second, it denotes defiance and the possibility of radically different futures beyond elusive climate resilience.
What these pillars of the thermopolitical project suggest is that harm and damage nonetheless hold the potential for regenerative and justice-driven survival. This is not naïve or wishful thinking. Hopeful thermopolitics does not deny harm; instead, it insists on alternatives. It urges us to reclaim the urban atmosphere from metrics and managerial abstraction and reimagine it as a space of obligation, intimacy, and healing. This, in turn, requires practice and commitment, as Hamilton, Zettel, and Neimanis (2021) demonstrate with their experiments in “feminist infrastructures for better weathering.” Reparative scholarship through the lens of more-than-human geographies (Tschakert 2022) acknowledges that “wounded ecologies” (Taylor 2024), too, are deserving of recognition and relational care.
A hopeful thermopolitics is an antidote to slow sacrifice. The geographies of thermopolitical sacrifice as presented here advance Taylor's bold “environmentalism of the injured” (2024, 246) by foregrounding modes of governing thermal life, sharpening our analytical and methodological toolkit, and embracing a new lexicon that can hold the tension between sacrifice, better weathering, and regeneration. Together, these tools allow us to scrutinize the power and politics of everyday, embodied thermal violence and help overcome them by co-creating more just, cooler, and liveable worlds, with all of us who carry the heat.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to my colleagues in Politics, Economics, and Space (PEAS) and Social Cultural Geographies (SCG) in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore for critical reading and encouraging feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.