Climate Change Makes Protests Harder—Including Climate Change Protests

Protesters are at the mercy of Mother Nature during outdoor demonstrations, which could become riskier as climate change accelerates.

Last Saturday, Laurie Marshall joined hundreds of people in El Paso, Texas, for the city’s “No Kings Day” protests, part of a nationwide series of actions in opposition of what organizers say is authoritarian behavior by the Trump administration. 

As protesters flooded the streets, temperatures climbed past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. After four years living in El Paso, Marshall is used to extreme summer heat, but even she hit her limit after about an hour and a half in the blazing sun. 

“My face was beet red, and I knew it was time for me to get out of the heat,” Marshall told me. “I’m 75 years old, and I made sure that I had a hat and an umbrella and plenty of water, and it was so hot that there were two people who actually had fainted from the heat and had to be taken to a cooler setting.”

“No Kings Day” participants in other areas of the American Southwest and parts of the Southeast faced similarly sizzling conditions as they held signs and chanted refrains rebuking federal decisions to slash budgets, cut tens of thousands of jobs, roll back environmental protections and raid businesses to arrest immigrant workers. 

Protesters around the world are facing rising public health risks as climate change intensifies heat and other extreme weather like flooding or wildfires. It’s getting harder to protest climate change, in fact, without feeling climate change’s effects.

Protest Pressures: The “No Kings Day” rallies on June 14 spanned rural areas and every major city in the U.S., from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Equipped with colorful signs and bullhorns, peaceful protesters united in frustration against recent moves made by President Donald Trump, who sat at a military parade in Washington, D.C., that was scheduled on the same day for the Army’s 250th anniversary (which also coincides with his 79th birthday). I asked Marshall what brought her out for El Paso’s event. 

“We’re in a constitutional crisis,” she told me. “We are experiencing a coup that wants to destroy democracy—that’s based in the vision of Project 2025, where billionaire elites rule the country.”

Many protesters focused their demonstrations on immigration policies, while others zeroed in on the Trump administration’s push to sell off public lands and eliminate climate-related regulations. Similar nationwide rallies earlier this year protested cuts to federal science programs, which my colleagues covered in March. When I asked the White House for a comment about protesters’ claims that the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis and that the Trump administration has taken authoritarian actions in recent months, a spokesperson sent me a link to a post on X from June 14.

In a separate post on X, Cheung said that “over 250,000 patriots showed up” to the parade. Organizers estimated that more than 5 million people participated in thousands of protests on the same day, NPR reports. 

Like attendees at any other outdoor event, protesters are at the mercy of Mother Nature. For climate activists, this extreme weather often highlights the very cause they are fighting for. 

For example, in 2023, a demonstration by climate protesters at the iconic Burning Man festival was interrupted by intense rainfall that flooded the Nevada desert location, NPR reports. Research shows that rain in the Southwest is becoming more likely with climate change to fall in short, aggressive bursts, which can trigger intense flooding because the ground can’t absorb the inundation fast enough. 

“You can’t directly attribute this event to climate change,” Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told NPR. “But we are seeing impacts and extreme weather all over the place now … so folks can make their own decisions about how they’re observing the climate change in front of their very eyes.”

Research suggests that poor weather can negatively affect participation at protests, depending on the severity. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in rainfall during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reduced turnout by around 1 percent. Meanwhile, heatwaves are known to drive up cases of heat stress, increase psychological distress and potentially even exacerbate urban unrest. 

In other cases, though, extreme weather can galvanize climate protesters. Last summer, my colleague Keerti Gopal covered a series of nonviolent protests dubbed the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” in Manhattan, which targeted banks and insurance companies for enabling continued fossil fuel expansion. Gopal spoke with New York activist Rachel Rivera on a scorching day in late July about her child’s recent asthma attack, exacerbated by the heat waves that hit New York City over the summer. 

Staying Safe: Many protests take place in urban areas, often more vulnerable to poor air quality, flooding and heat than their rural counterparts. That’s largely due to the lack of vegetation in cities, which are instead lined with heat-absorbing asphalt and concrete. 

Connie Crawford, a 75-year-old woman who also attended the “No Kings Day” protests in El Paso, felt this urban heat island effect directly. 

For most of the protest, she was posted up near a parking lot without much access to shade and had to sit on the curb for a few minutes when the fatigue of the hot day caught up with her. As I pointed out in a recent newsletter, older adults face higher threats from heat, largely because our sweat glands and ability to process higher temperatures change as we age—a risk that Crawford is acutely aware of. 

“I’m older, and I felt a teeny bit woozy at one point,” she told me. “I had some other friends who are older who had [to leave] early. They had planned to stay the whole time, and they left early because of the heat.” 

So how can people stay safe during an outdoor protest? Many tips are fairly simple, such as using sunscreen, wearing sunglasses or a hat and drinking copious amounts of water. 

As Wired points out in their guide to safe protesting, these supplies can also be used to guard yourself from other threats; sunglasses can shield your face from surveillance while water can be used to clean wounds and flush your eyes if you are pepper-sprayed or hit with chemical gas. 

Public health experts say it is also crucial to recognize the signs of heat stress, which include heavy sweating, dizziness, cramping and headaches. 

With these growing climate and security risks in mind, volunteer EMTs, nurses and paramedics have stepped up in recent years during protests to ensure that demonstrators have ample medical support. Most recently, a group of volunteer health professionals called the Pulse Collective rallied around “No Kings Day” demonstrators in Denver to offer immediate medical care if needed, CBS News reports. 

“Best case? We just hand out water, treat a few heat injuries and eat pizza at the med tent,” Jake Paul, the group’s medical coordinator, told CBS prior to the demonstrations. “If we’re bored, that means everyone’s safe.”

Cover photo:  EL PASO, TEXAS, USA - JUNE 14: Hundreds of demonstrators participated in the "No Kings" rallies in El Paso, Texas. Credit: Jorge Salgado/Anadolu via Getty Images