Heat Legislation in California: Gaps, Innovations, and Opportunities

This report examines California’s legislative record on extreme heat from 2014 through 2025. During this period, California introduced 128 bills addressing extreme heat mitigation and adaptation, of which 57 passed—a passage rate of approximately 45%. California has also committed funding at a scale no other state has approached, treating heat as a comprehensive public investment rather than a narrow regulatory problem.

This is the second report in a series of regional heat legislation reviews produced by the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. It is organized around the regional geographies established by the USDA Climate Hubs. Among those, California is the only single-state region; all other regions in the framework group multiple states, making for easy regional comparison. Because it stands alone, California’s record requires a different comparative approach.

By employing an internationally recognized framework for disaster risk reduction to examine legislation at the state scale, the authors find:

• California has built the most extensive state-level heat policy framework in the country.
• California has the pieces of a coordinated heat governance system but has not built the connections between them. 
• The scale of investment needed for heat infrastructure is not fully supported by the financial tools California is currently employing.
• California passes bills that enable voluntary action and vetoes bills that require compliance. 
• California’s legislative record has treated heat as an acute public health emergency rather than a chronic, multi-sectoral stressor.

Looking at the deployed policy through three lenses—mechanism, sector, and theme—the authors reveal the setbacks and opportunities for practical, viable heat-related legislation in California and beyond. 

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• California Leads on Heat Policy—with Room to Improve, Duke Analysis Finds
   

For media inquiries, contact the Nicholas Institute communications team at ni-comm@duke.edu.