Climate change will harm our health. Here's what could protect us.

As the planet warms, our environment will be transformed, but so will our bodies. In this series, ' Burning up ,' we investigate the health impacts of climate change, focusing on heat , air quality , food and infection risk . In this installment, we evaluate the promising solutions that could help us adapt to our warmer future

In the summer of 2008, New York City lowered the threshold for activating its emergency heat plan.

The city had historically relied on the National Weather Service threshold of a heat index of 105 F (40.6 C), but they noticed that people were getting heat stroke at lower temperatures.

As part of a wider effort, they changed the alert threshold: it would trigger if the temperature reached 100 F (37.8 C) for a day, or 95 F (35 C) for two days in a row. When the threshold was reached, city officials conducted targeted outreach, including to vulnerable groups, like homeless people; alerted residents on their phones; launched measures to protect the power and water supply; and opened cooling centers.

Lowering this threshold correlated with a more than 50% reduction in hospitalizations for heat stroke and related illnesses on hot days.

New York's case study offers one of the clearest examples of an intervention that worked to protect people from deadly heat.

As the planet warms, we will need to find more of these solutions. The consensus among scientists is that the most effective way to avoid the worst health outcomes of climate change is to slow warming by reducing carbon emissions. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), for instance, would mean 11,600 fewer deaths due to wildfire smoke exposure in the U.S. annually, compared with warming of 5.4 F (3 C).

But even if we rapidly reduce emissions, climate change will have wide-ranging effects on our health