Cities Vote to Keep the Night Cooling Centers Open Year-Round

Three municipal councils across the warm belt voted this week to keep their emergency night-cooling centers open the year round, converting a summer stopgap into standing civic infrastructure, city clerks confirmed Wednesday. The centers — libraries, transit halls and school gyms held open through the dark hours — sheltered tens of thousands during July's peak, and councilors argued the heat no longer respects a season. "We opened them for six weeks and forty thousand people came through mine alone," said a councilwoman in a Mediterranean port city who sponsored the measure. "You do not close a door that many people needed." The move dovetails with the Concordat's water session in Geneva, where adaptation, not just allocation, has crept onto the agenda. Hearth Relief International, which staffed several centers alongside city crews, welcomed the permanence: registered climate migrants now past 108 million are increasingly urban, and arrive where the cooling is. The vote binds budgets, not just goodwill. "Permanent means funded," the councilwoman said. "That was the whole fight."