Global Partners Summit

Extreme heat continues to represent a vital block to be resolved within climate adaptation as its impacts are far reaching and penetrate health, productivity and resilience at a systemic level. As a result, the  Global Partners Summit served as a strategic learning and collaboration convening  designed to strengthen collective impact across the growing ecosystem of organizations working on extreme heat and health. The objectives of the Summit were to:

• Bring together practitioners and partners working on heat-health action to share strategies, implementation experiences, learning, and evidence-based solutions that deliver people-centered impact.
• Develop a shared ambition for impact and scale, grounded in a common narrative, cohesive messaging, and aligned definitions of success across the field.
• Explore pathways to scale heat-health solutions, including through policy influence, institutionalization, financing mechanisms, and cross-sectoral collaboration.

Three Horizons Framework

To anchor the convening towards strengthening an emerging ecosystem of actors working on extreme heat and health, the team employed a foresight framework from the field of future studies, alongside participatory design methods to structure discussion and collaboration.

The Three Horizons model helps groups examine the current system, surface emerging innovations, and identify pathways for transformation. By looking beyond immediate operational challenges, the framework encourages participants to explore how today's practices, partnerships, and ideas can collectively shape a more resilient and effective field for protecting populations from extreme heat.

The framework was used to help structure the convening by

• Focusing on mapping current evidence, operational realities, and system bottlenecks across the partner landscape
• Using speculative design to imagine preferable futures for vulnerable populations
• Facilitated alignment on the transition by identifying system shifts, strategic bets, and collective commitments

Co-Design Interventions

Quicksand designed numerous participatory exercises to help translate abstract foresight into tangible strategy, such as:

• Object-Based Storytelling: Participants began with sharing local artifacts like handfans or heat-monitoring wearables to anchor the room in diverse, lived global realities. Tangible items like handfans from Switzerland and handloom scarves from Bangladesh to data loggers from South Africa and wearable heat-monitoring tech from Brazil, were shared.
• Hall of Truths and Tensions: Participants individually captured widely accepted systemic realities (Truths) and deep operational points of friction or uncertainty (Tensions) holding progress back. After sharing reflections in intimate cross-table triads, these postcards were pinned onto collective public boards to visually surface patterns, alignments, and key divergences across the portfolio.
• Headlines from 2035: Shifting from current limitations to long-term imagination, participants engaged in a speculative prototyping exercise. Teams were provided custom front-page layouts for a fictional newspaper called "The Evolving Times" and tasked with designing a preferable future scenario where 1 billion people are protected from extreme heat by 2035.
• Breakthrough Pathways Design: To ensure that future thinking was directly linked to actionable strategy rather than left as pure abstraction, teams immediately ran a backcasting exercise to ground their 2035 newspaper headlines. Using a structured "Building Blocks" worksheet, participants identified the exact institutional milestones required to achieve their preferable scenario.
• Simulation: To underline latent system dynamics and behavioral incentives, participants engaged in a role-based crisis simulation centered around a fictional heat emergency. By stepping entirely outside their professional expertise through role reversal, global actors navigated a high-urgency scenario stripped of geographic bias, cultivating deep structural empathy across the ecosystem. Utilising predefined interventions, the exercise focused on coordination, resource negotiation, and complex systemic trade-offs.

Learnings and Next Steps

The Summit helped many participants to collectively reframe their understanding of heat as a systemic issue extending to not just health but also shaping agriculture, livelihoods, and infrastructure. They agreed the real challenge isn't strategy but implementation—closing the gap between ideas, securing funding, and scaling through incremental shifts in strategy. This required the group to interrogate why existing  institutions fall short before building new ones. Lastly, the collective group of actors laid steps for the future such as sustaining the new network with accountability, engaging the private sector beyond funding, and pushing the agenda upward to bridge funding and on-the-ground implementation. What began as a strategic alignment exercise concluded as a standing commitment to remain accountable towards each other to turn heat resilience into scaled practice.