A former aide to the noted climate activist Mayor of Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Eugenia Kargbo is one of five official Chief Heat Officers (CHOs) in the world. After being appointed in 2021, she joins fellow CHOs from Athens, Miami, Santiago, Chile, and Monterrey, Mexico in a program sponsored by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock). 

Arsht-Rock, along with the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA), developed and piloted the role of CHOs to have officials "charged with unifying the response to the challenge of heat to reduce risks and impacts of extreme heat for their residents and constituents."

For these officers appointed by local officials in their cities, much of the work entails attempting to consolidate their communities' disparate (and sometimes madcap) efforts to address climate issues that are too often spread between conflicting bureaucratic hierarchies. 

In a city that’s saturated with substandard housing and suffering from a lack of Western media attention, Kargbo has been busy in her new post implementing Freetown's first heat map, surveying households to learn how families are coping with extreme heat and working on a greening project called Freetown The Tree Town. The project calls for 1 million trees to be planted by year's end. 

She explains to Hassan Bangura of Experience Magazine that her work now is to enact additional resiliency measures locally before more residents crowded into the city's 68 informal settlements succumb to temperatures projected to rise between 1.0 and 2.6°C before 2060.

“What’s happening here is becoming unbearable, but it’s also invisible. We have to convince people to make this a priority before it’s too late [...] People are experiencing climate change, and I’m in a position of power now to do something about how they experience it,” she adds. “That wakes me up every single day.”