As record heat was just starting to sweep across the Northern Hemisphere this summer, Nikolaos Mihalopoulos was clearing the overgrowth in his garden of olive and citrus trees in the Peloponnese region of Greece.

His village home had been basking in the rainy month of June, and the grasses were growing to over 3 feet, he says. In early July, he had to clear the overgrowth yet again. 

Then, like so many other regions throughout northern Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, an unprecedented heat wave began to sweep over Greece, pushing temperatures up to a record 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the Peloponnese. June’s verdant landscapes quickly dried to a desiccated yellow – setting the stage for a conflagration of wildfires that grabbed global headlines in July.

Wildfires are relatively common this time of year, but high temperatures and strong winds turned them into heat wave-inflicted infernos racing through dried-out landscapes. Almost 20,000 tourists needed to be rescued on the island of Rhodes – an operation Greek officials called the country’s largest evacuation effort ever. Firefighting crews from all over Europe were brought in to battle the flames, even as the 2023 wildfires were spewing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a week than Greece normally produces in a year.

“More and more people are now persuaded that there is a climate crisis,” says Dr. Mihalopoulos, research director at the Institute for Environmental Research and Sustainable Development at the National Observatory of Athens, which began meteorological observations in 1858. “I don’t know if they know the causes – this is a big question mark. But they know that something not normal is happening.”

Petros Giannakouris/AP

People play on Glystra Beach in front of a forest burnt by wildfires on the island of Rhodes, Greece, July 27, 2023.

Regardless of public attitudes, the changing climate is putting the country’s iconic olive oil production at risk. Tourism, which comprises nearly 20% of Greece’s economy, is also threatened. By necessity, most homes in large cities now have air conditioners, and about half in smaller towns and villages do as well. It has created a vicious circle that requires the production of even more carbon-emitting energy, while also taking up a greater share of household costs.

Discussions of climate change, in fact, have been happening for over 50 years. The long-term impact of carbon emissions and the resulting global greenhouse effects are both well-established and relatively simple scientific observations. Headlines over the past decade have reported other dangerous heat waves, massive wildfires, and patterns of unusually violent weather.

But the summer of 2023 has been especially and vividly cruel around the world in ways never seen before, possibly making it an inflection point, a proverbial tipping point that forces human beings to change.

“There is a greater sense of awareness, which is not the same as greater sense of urgency,” says Sam Fankhauser, professor of climate change economics and policy at the University of Oxford in England.

Something not normal is happening. July was the hottest month ever recorded, according to multiple weather agencies. Some climate scientists think it might even be the hottest month in the past 120,000 years, when measuring global averages. In its first week, July produced the three hottest single days ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The hottest eight years on record, in fact, have all happened after 2015.

In the same way, ocean temperatures as a whole have never recorded temperatures as high as they are today. Weather buoys in and around the Florida Keys in late July measured waters topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported. That’s the temperature of an average hot tub.

Matthew Thayer/The Maui News/AP

The hall of the historic Waiola Church in Lahaina and nearby Lahaina Hongwanji Mission are engulfed in flames, Aug. 8, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii.

In the United States, at least 5,300 climate records around the country have been broken or equaled this summer, says Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets in Boston, which analyzes data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These include record-high temperatures during the day, record-high nighttime temperatures, the most consecutive days above 100 F, and other climate abnormalities. 

In North America, hundreds of wildfires burned all summer across Canada. The smoke came billowing down into the U.S. from Minnesota all the way to the Northeast, driving Americans indoors to escape toxic air – with New York recording the worst air quality in the world. In the Pacific, deadly fires in Hawaii this week overwhelmed rescue services, killing several dozen and wiping out historic neighborhoods. Phone services – including 911 – went down, and there were widespread reports of people jumping into the ocean to escape the flames.

If the data on global warming may indeed shift public attitudes and policy decisions, it may be the “invisible hand” of global capitalism putting systematic pressure on modern economies that ultimately speeds up the transition to carbon-neutral energy sources, Mr. Rothstein says.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Palestinian men cool off during a heat wave in al-Auja springs near Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, July 18, 2023.

“If you just look at the banking industry, there is more climate risk on the balance sheets of banks today ... than there was in 2008 because of subprime housing,” says Mr. Rothstein, whose company aims to transform the practices and policies that govern capital markets to reduce the economic risks of the climate crisis.

Insurance companies around the world are deciding to no longer cover certain regions – including the states of California and Florida – or certain businesses because of climate-related disasters. According to Ceres’ analysis of available data, there have been 357 natural disasters in the U.S. that had damages of more than $1 billion since 1980. They are now becoming more frequent.

In the 1980s, the time between billion-dollar disasters was an average of 82 days. In the years from 2017 to 2021, there was an average of only 18 days between billion-dollar disasters. All said, the total cost of these climate events since 1980 has exceeded $2.54 trillion.

Arguments against environmental protection and climate action over the past 50 years have almost always been rooted in the costs to economic growth. Today, however, the costs of climate change are putting long-term economic growth in peril even more, from disrupted supply chains, a lack of water in areas where businesses would hope to expand, and increased costs to keep indoor areas cool.

The costs of transition to carbon neutrality, though difficult and expensive, also provide a host of new opportunities for economic growth, Mr. Rothstein says. To meet climate goals set by the United Nations and other international protocols, economies worldwide will need to spend between $4 trillion and $5 trillion a year to transition to new and renewable sources of energy.

“You know, I am an incurable optimist, but I hope we move faster,” he says. “There are a lot of companies and a lot of policymakers that are doing amazing work. ... But it’s also sobering,” he adds. “I have a little 6-month-old granddaughter, and I am sobered to think of what her life will be like.”

Matt York/AP

Heat ripples engulf two ladies crossing the street on July 17 in downtown Phoenix. The city set a record with 31 consecutive days above 110 F.

But if the invisible hand of global capitalism will force structural changes, public attitudes and political leadership remain essential parts of long-term solutions – and ongoing obstacles.

“People are now aware that climate change is real, and they feel that one has something to do about it,” says Dr. Fankhauser at Oxford. “Where it tends to break down is when that climate action is linked to our own behavior. All of a sudden it is your car, your holiday, your boiler that is the problem. Then the urgency starts to break down. It’s partly understandable because we are going through high energy costs and other living cost issues.”

Parisian Céline Vergnes and her family of four normally travel by train to their vacation destination. It’s a lot more expensive, but it’s worth it to them since it is the most efficient in terms of carbon emissions.

Apart from a few major trips – Tunisia in 2022, a family trip to Sri Lanka in 2017 – the family shuns plane travel, which pumps more carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere.

“We’ve already made the choice of a train over a plane to go to the southwest or southeast of France for ecological – not economic – reasons,” says Ms. Vergnes, who composts, makes her family’s deodorant and laundry detergent, and doesn’t buy products packaged in plastic.

Some 83% of French people – including at least 70% of every age group and political identity – said climate change and its consequences are the biggest challenges for humanity in the 21st century, according to a 2021 survey by the European Investment Bank.

Manu Fernandez/AP

People rest during a hot day in Madrid, July 19, 2023. Most of Spain is under alert for extreme heat with forecasts calling for peak temperatures of 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas. Spain is also dealing with a prolonged drought that has increased concerns about wildfires.

The French are also committed. At least 77% of adults said they had modified their lifestyle because of climate change, and almost 60% said they only took planes out of absolute necessity, according to a poll published this past June by Odoxa, an independent research institute.

Responding to public pressure, French lawmakers in May banned short-haul domestic flights for journeys that could be taken in less than 2 1/2 hours by train. They vowed to crack down on the use of private jets for short trips, after French football stars were criticized for flying to games instead of taking the train.

Some critics said the measure amounted to nothing more than “greenwashing.” The law only affects 2.5% of domestic flights.

For people committed to changing their personal behavior, the general dearth of government leadership and large-scale solutions can be both frustrating and defeating. “The government hasn’t introduced any action that could really be considered effective because they don’t regulate obvious problems,” says Ms. Vergnes.

The system itself, in this case, has also created a yawning gap between economic incentives and meaningful change. Traveling by train, the most environmentally efficient, is by far the most expensive. 

Sinead Philips, an Englishwoman living in Paris, would prefer to take the train back to the United Kingdom when she travels home. In mid-April, she’d made plans to visit London, but train prices were “exorbitant,” she says.

“I looked at the prices, and whichever way I tried, it would not bring the price down to anything less than 300 euros,” says Ms. Philips. “For a night in London, are you kidding me?” She bought an overnight bus ticket to London for 80 euros and then a one-way flight to Paris for 33 euros. “It seems mad to me that the flight was less than half of what the bus cost,” she says.

In many ways, the chasm between costly climate policies and economic realities has been for decades the primary obstacle to reducing carbon emissions, often creating an inversion of goals and incentives.

“French people who have the means are ready to make sacrifices to help save the environment. That makes me pretty optimistic,” says Antoine Guillou, the deputy mayor of Paris and a trained economist.

Hassan Ammar/AP

A man pours cold water onto his head to cool off on a sweltering day in Beirut, Lebanon, July 16, 2023. July 2023 was Earth's hottest month on record.

“Why don’t things advance? Because they cost money, and no one knows how to split up the responsibility. That’s the real issue,” he says. “With the plane versus the train, we know what to do. We need to invest massively in train travel and infrastructure. ... We need to invest a lot now to have the benefits later.

“The costs of inaction are far higher than the costs of the transition to renewable energy,” Mr. Guillou continues. “The more we wait, the more this is true. And then the questions are, where do we get the money and who pays? The longer we wait, the more we have a tendency to push this question further and further away.”

In Germany, up to 90% of adults also agree that climate action is needed, according to numerous surveys. The dramatic drought and heat wave of 2018 helped illustrate that need, as images of beloved German rivers running dry dominated headlines.

Sparked by the leadership of then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sitting in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks, German teens helped launch Fridays For Future, a youth-led protest movement.

“All that certainly had levels of political impact,” says Sven Egenter, editor-in-chief of Clean Energy Wire. “Angela Merkel actually said the young people taking the streets in 2019 sped up the government’s decision making, such as passing the German climate law.”

But the political momentum of that young movement has stalled in Germany.

Michael Probst/AP

People cool off at a public pool in Wehrheim near Frankfurt, Germany, July 8, 2023.

That political dynamic has played out with the German Green Party’s attempt this year to ban gas boilers and mandate heat pumps. The technology, in which a coolant extracts heat from outdoors and pumps it into a building, can also be used as a means of cooling indoor temperatures. They run significantly more efficiently than gas boilers or air conditioners, but they are often prohibitively expensive to install. 

So far, Nordic countries such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have had the most success mandating heat pumps and placing carbon taxes on energy sources, even amid public resistance.

Robert Habeck, Germany’s minister for economic affairs and climate action, tried to ban the installation of all new gas boilers starting in 2024. German media and a good part of the population resisted.

For weeks in May, headlines mocked “Habeck’s heat hammer,” and the tabloid Bild, Europe’s bestselling newspaper, proclaimed the proposal would destroy Germans’ savings and intrude into the privacy of their homes. The controversy divided the ruling coalition, and the proposed regulations were abandoned.

“What is getting battled out now is, who will do what and how?” says Mr. Egenter. “This question of market-based regulation, individualism versus big players, paying through taxes or debt payment – a lot of it gets instrumentalized as a political wedge issue.”

The effect, he adds, is “that action moves more slowly than it should, or the government becomes [reluctant] to take a bigger role.”

The youth activism that once resonated with the public is now falling on exasperated ears, as more extreme groups such as Letzte Generation and Extinction Rebellion resort to increasingly disruptive protests, such as gluing themselves to roadways, throwing food at museum pieces, or chaining themselves to goal posts during football matches.

Polls in Germany find that public support for climate protesters has halved since 2021, from nearly 70% to 34% in 2023. In May, police conducted a raid on certain Letzte Generation members, using a law originally designed to target domestic terrorism.

Climate action nearly always ranks among Germans’ most important political priorities. But, according to the research firm More in Common Germany, the predominant emotion nearly half the country now feels is “helplessness.” Nearly a third feel “disappointment,” while a fourth feel “anger.”

Yamam al Shaar/Reuters

A boy carries a block of ice as he walks along a street during a heat wave in Damascus, Syria, July 17, 2023.

Like Europe, much of the United States has broiled this summer under record-breaking heat. Unlike Europe, America remains a country divided on the urgency of the need for action. In the U.S., 54% percent of adults say climate change is a major threat to the country, according to a Pew Research Center survey this year. But this includes a deep partisan divide: Seventy-eight percent of Democrats believe climate change is a major threat while only 23% of Republicans say the same.

Bakersfield, California – home of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy – embodies that divide. In the sweltering heat of late July, there were no available beds at The Mission at Kern County, a shelter that has about 300 spaces for men, women, and children.

Serving more than 200,000 meals a year to the region’s most vulnerable residents, The Mission usually has plenty of beds available in the summer.

“People can sleep outside, you know, if it’s a summer night, 80 degrees, 78 degrees,” says Carlos Baldovinos, The Mission’s executive director. “But if it gets as hot as we’re seeing, if it’s been hot like this for the last eight days, over 100 degrees? People don’t want to be out there.”

Kern County, where nearly 1 in 5 residents live below the poverty line, provides cooling centers when the heat reaches 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Baldovinos offers The Mission’s day center as a cooling site when temps hit 95 F. “Hot is hot,” he says. “So it’s open.”

As the planet warms, experts say much of the human costs of climate change fall on those with the least, including older adults, one-parent families, and communities of color.

“Unfortunately, like most things, the burden is disproportionately on low-wealth families and brown and Black communities,” says Mr. Rothstein at Ceres. “For example, the average low-wealth family community has far fewer trees compared to their neighbors in wealthy neighborhoods. There are more buses and cars, more pollution, and ... it’s on average 2.3 degrees hotter in poor neighborhoods.

“That affects not just productivity; it also affects health, incidences of asthma, and people’s well-being,” says Mr. Rothstein.

This is one of the reasons California has long been aggressive on climate policy. Last year, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared the state would move as fast as it could to reach its climate goals, outlining a plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

The plan calls for new infrastructure, including offshore wind farms, climate-friendly homes equipped with heat pumps, and the expansion of the technology of carbon capture, which scrubs carbon emissions at the source and stores it underground.

Part of the state’s goals also includes reducing fossil fuel consumption to less than one-tenth of current use in just over two decades.

That reflects the country’s priorities. Two-thirds of U.S. adults say the country should prioritize developing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, over expanding the production of oil, coal, and natural gas, according to a Pew survey conducted in June.

But Kern County, just two hours north of Los Angeles, is oil country. Ever since California’s first oil field was discovered in 1876, the fossil fuel has powered the region’s economic growth and been a major producer of America’s energy needs.

Gregory Bull/AP

Sweat covers the face of Juan Carlos Biseno as afternoon temperatures reach 115 F, July 19, 2023, in Calexico, California.

Today, California remains the seventh-largest oil-producing state in the U.S. – and more than 70% of that oil comes from Kern County, where Chevron is one of the largest employers and the county’s largest property taxpayer.

“Affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner energy is essential to enabling human progress,” writes a Chevron spokesperson in an email, noting that the company spent more than $371 million on locally produced products and services from central California suppliers and contributed more than $6.1 million to local nonprofit organizations last year alone.

“But operating in California has never been more difficult because of the state’s energy policy,” the company contends. “[The state] has set overaggressive goals for reducing liquid fuels. But the state’s drivers, truckers, and flyers all require reliable, affordable fuels.”

The money that the oil industry spends in the community and the taxes it pays fund schools, public safety, and infrastructure, says Kristen Watson, chief of staff to the president of California State University, Bakersfield. The university houses the California Energy Research Center, which explores long-term energy solutions and the transition to more diverse energy production.

So, the region and the state differ in their vision for the immediate future, but “we recognize that we have the potential to support the idea of carbon neutrality,” says Dr. Watson, former president and CEO of the Kern Community Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit. “But from our perspective, it’s not all or none.”

Chevron and other oil producers have been a significant part of carbon-capture projects, and Kern County, which also has the country’s largest wind farm and third-largest solar farm, recently won federal funding to develop a clean energy and carbon management business park.

“We want to be part of the solution, but we want to make sure that we’re a part of the solution that doesn’t result in the decimation of the region’s economy,” Dr. Watson says.

Yet global temperatures are projected to keep rising over the next few years, especially as the phenomenon of El Niño, a warming of ocean temperatures in the Pacific that usually raises average global temperatures, has just begun again this year.

In the early evening, it was still 102 F at 6 p.m. in Bakersfield as Austin Weber and her best friend Sirena Salazar packed their belongings after spending the day at one of the city’s public water parks.

The water park is a popular option for people on a tight budget looking to cool off, and both women brought their children to have a picnic and celebrate Ms. Salazar’s birthday. 

Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor

Sirena Salazar packs up a birthday picnic she enjoyed with her friends and children at a public water park in Bakersfield, California, July 20, when temperatures reached triple digits.

The mood is festive, despite the enervating heat. “Every day, it is hotter,” says Ms. Salazar, who mentions global warming in the same breath. “Every year, it’s getting hotter.”

The heat has made things difficult for Ms. Weber, whose electric bills have nearly doubled. Turning off her air conditioner is hardly an option in triple-digit temperatures, especially with young children in her apartment. On an extremely tight budget, however, she’s not sure how she can afford to pay her bills.

Ms. Weber is waiting on an application to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for assistance offered to low-income households. She recently completed a program to pay off debt.

Her electric bill was a “big chunk” of her monthly budget, even before it skyrocketed along with the thermometer.

Ms. Salazar, a Bakersfield native, works full time. She stays in a shelter with her three children, who vie for the top bunk to be close to the cool air coming from the ceiling vent in her small room. “We do anything that cools us down,” she says.

Both women are resigned to the heat. “I try to just humble myself, get through it, because we’re not God,” Ms. Salazar says. “We can’t change the weather.”

Ariel Palitz, the former “night mayor” of New York, has a confession: She once owned the “No. 1 noisiest bar” in Manhattan. The city received a record number of complaints about the sound levels in her nightclub. 

Years later, when Ms. Palitz became the city’s point person for overseeing nightlife, she found herself in the middle of other long-running wars between residents and hospitality venues. Ms. Palitz still chuckles at the irony. Her solution was to launch a conflict resolution program called MEND (Mediating Establishment Neighborhood Disputes). 

During a pilot program, she convened a meeting between a nightclub and the seven residents of a neighboring apartment building. They sat in a circle of chairs in the venue’s courtyard. Both sides expressed their grievances. That led to greater mutual empathy.

“There was an agreement that there would be a group text,” says Ms. Palitz, who was executive director of the New York City mayor’s Office of Nightlife from 2018 until earlier this year. “It’s about being able to create a system of communication that is effective and mutually respectful ... so that when there is an escalation of sound, or any kind of disturbance, they can communicate directly and not through the authorities.”

Photo Courtesy of Ariel Palitz/Lincoln Center

Ariel Palitz speaks at the opening night for The Oasis at Lincoln Center, June 1, 2022, in New York. Ms. Palitz served as "night mayor" from 2018 until 2023.

Ms. Palitz was part of the first wave of night mayors around the world. Amsterdam pioneered the position in 2012; now more than 50 cities have one. At first, night mayors narrowly advocated on behalf of the hospitality sector. They’re increasingly adopting a more holistic vision of how 24-hour cities depend on harmonious relationships between nighttime businesses, city departments, and residents. Instead of imposing bureaucratic edicts, they’re ushering in collaborative governance. Instead of chief party planners, they are becoming midnight mediators.

“A nighttime economy manager looks at the nighttime economy across disciplines, across city agencies [and] works to facilitate dialogue,” says Ben Van Houten, president of the Night Time Economy Culture and Policy Alliance. “The nighttime economy is an area of city life that is both integral to vibrant cities, but also hasn’t really been fully studied, understood, planned for in cities.”

That’s starting to change. The devastating effect of pandemic lockdowns on nighttime economies raised awareness of how vital those sectors are to the lifeblood of cities, says Mr. Van Houten, who is also the business development manager for nightlife and entertainment in San Francisco. 

Many city offices closed for good during the pandemic. The ones that remained have often shifted toward a hybrid workweek in which employees return to cubicles Tuesday through Thursday. In hubs such as Boston and Philadelphia – each of which recently hired night mayors – that’s impacted the ecosystem of hospitality and entertainment businesses clustered around business districts. Foot traffic is down. People still hanker to go out at night, so the challenge for night mayors is to make their cities safer and more inviting destinations. 

In Philadelphia, Raheem Manning is bringing a synergistic approach to that assignment. Over the past year, the nighttime economy director has made over 200 stops to talk with cabdrivers, nurses, DJs, trash collectors, restaurant owners, retail workers, and residents. 

“One of the biggest revelations that people have when they talk to me on tour is they are surprised that the city, the Commerce Department, wants to see them thrive and have resources to make it happen,” says Mr. Manning during a Zoom call. “I don’t have a vision that I would implement for what Philly’s nighttime economy looks like. I am a conduit to implement the vision of the stakeholders.”

Photo Courtesy of City of Philadelphia Department of Commerce

Raheem Manning, Philadelphia’s director of the nighttime economy, meets with LGBTQ+ nightlife entrepreneurs, promoters, DJs, and business owners as part of a listening tour, April 19, 2023.

“The hours of a vampire”

Mr. Manning is part of a worldwide WhatsApp group for night mayors who help each other with advice. Many of them have prior experience working in the after-dark hospitality industry. (“You become a nightlife mayor because you keep the hours of a vampire,” says Ms. Palitz.) They’re gregarious social creatures with good people skills – and glamorous Instagram accounts with photos of festive soirees. Mr. Manning has been in conversation with Amsterdam about the teams it employs to make the city safer after sunset. The Netherlands capital deploys red-jacket hosts to offer advice about local attractions, assist overly inebriated revelers, and de-escalate drunken brawls. Mr. Manning hopes to roll out a similar initiative called the Corridor Ambassador Program. 

“If you are at a restaurant and it’s late ... you can grab a corridor ambassador and say, ‘Hey, I’m a couple blocks over; could you walk me to my home?’” says Mr. Manning. “[The idea] was sparked from Mirik Milan, the first night mayor in the world. His host program at Rembrandt Plaza really helped transform how people felt about their entertainment district.”

For some cities, the biggest post-pandemic issue is noise. In Barcelona, Spain, residents had become accustomed to quiet nights during lockdowns. Then the revelers came back. In April, Barcelona announced that it would appoint a night mayor after discovering that the Spanish city’s nightlife hot spots exceed the sound levels recommended by the World Health Organization.  

Last year, Andreina Seijas, a renowned consultant on urban planning and nightlife governance, coordinated a series of workshops to help Barcelona devise a vision for the city after the sun goes down. Participants hailed from a variety of demographics and seemed to have little in common. But they shared one desire: They wanted to change the image of Barcelona as a city where merrymakers are welcome to misbehave, says Ms. Seijas in a Zoom call. 

“One of the things I’ve been trying to do in Latin America, and in Spain more recently, is incorporate elements from collaborative governance into nighttime planning,” says Ms. Seijas, a Venezuelan who has a doctorate in urban planning from Harvard University. “The formula that I’ve been using is essentially just creating spaces for people to listen to different interests.”

Power of persuasion vs. the “hammer approach”

In Britain, Sacha Lord, Manchester’s night mayor, has been practicing that principle since 2018. When Mr. Lord became the city’s night economy adviser, he convened a group of members of the National Health Service, local councilors, licensing solicitors, hoteliers, restaurant owners, and nightclub owners. The voices in the task force are important to Mr. Lord, because “I like to think I’m always right. I’m not.”

Darren Robinson

Sacha Lord, shown in 2021 at the Parklife music festival that he co-founded, became Manchester’s night mayor. As part of the unpaid advisory position, he does everything from dealing with noise complaints to lobbying for late-night mass transit for workers.

Mr. Lord, an entrepreneur who co-founded the city’s popular Parklife music festival, isn’t a city employee. He lobbied Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, for the job of an unsalaried adviser because he was frustrated that individual boroughs weren’t coordinating policies in unison. Mr. Lord has never forgotten a piece of advice he received from Mr. Burnham.

“He turned to me and said, ‘It’s much easier to work with people than against people,’” says Mr. Lord.

Mr. Lord has tackled everything from trying to reform tipping for nighttime workers, to battling energy companies over electricity prices on behalf of the hospitality sector, to advocating for more public transport for late-night workers. (The role of night mayor does not typically include moonlight ribbon-cutting ceremonies.) Because he doesn’t have formal power, persuasion is key to getting buy-in. 

“Occasionally you do have disagreements in closed rooms, but it is much better to try and work through those rather than just being stubborn and [saying], ‘No, it’s not happening,’” he says. “You try and reach something that works for everybody.” 

Night mayors often remind residents and businesses that they ultimately share a common goal of wanting to make their city a great place to live. New York City’s MEND program has dealt with negotiations, misunderstandings, and disputes between residents and businesses, commercial tenants and landlords, and businesses neighboring other businesses. The mediation process has an 80% resolution success rate.

During her tenure, Ms. Palitz also introduced MASH, which stands for Multi-Agency Support for Hospitality. Every six weeks, she convened the heads of 25 city agencies to talk about how to resolve issues through collaboration rather than enforcement – or, as she puts it, the “hammer approach.” She sought to put a human face on the hospitality industry.

“I really saw meaningful change in the way that the city interfaces with this industry,” says Ms. Palitz. “Industry people tell me that they ... feel that they are appreciated and respected in a way they never were before.”

Mahamadou Hamidou/Reuters

Members of a military council that staged a coup in Niger attend a rally at a stadium in Niamey, Niger, Aug. 6, 2023.

It was supposed to be everything Afghanistan wasn’t: a broad, strategically planned U.S. military, economic, political, and social partnership with a stable democratic government, and few American boots on the ground, aimed at turning back a tide of jihadist insurgency.

With wider geopolitical stakes, too, as military juntas were seizing power in nearby states and buttressing their hold on power with Russian Wagner Group mercenaries.

Yet now, with one sharp shock, all of that has been thrown into doubt.

Because within the space of a few hours late last month, military officers ousted the elected leader of U.S. ally Niger, too. It became the last of the countries of the Sahel region, the largely arid band girding north-central Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, to have been taken over by the military.

And that’s left Washington, along with allies in Europe and Africa, frantically looking this week for a way to persuade the coup leaders to go back to their barracks. Or, at the very least, to talk them out of following the lead of next-door juntas, in Mali and Burkina Faso, by turning to Russia for support.

But Niger matters not only because it was the Sahel’s sole surviving democracy.

Mahamadou Hamidou/Reuters

Thousands of protesters against Western sanctions imposed on putschist soldiers in Niger gather to support the coup d'état. The sign reads "Goodbye France."

It’s because Niger’s huge array of challenges is shared across the Sahel: violent Islamic insurgencies; the ravages of climate change; desperate poverty, especially among a rapidly growing younger population; and woefully inadequate education, health, and social services.

And it’s because not only Washington, but also the region’s former colonial power, France, had been deliberately moving away from an Afghanistan-style approach in favor of training, equipping, and funding the country’s own government to confront those daunting problems.

The breadth of that agenda, which now risks looking not just irrelevant but naive, was set out strikingly a year ago in a State Department policy document – one of the “integrated country strategies” drawn up as a four-year strategy for all overseas U.S. diplomatic missions.

The geopolitical value of increasingly strong ties was highlighted: Niger was “strategically important, as a linchpin for stability in the Sahel” and a “reliable counterterrorism partner.”

But the document detailed the huge economic and social challenges facing the country, and it gave them priority. The hierarchy of the “strategic axes” set out for relations with Niamey was telling: “diplomacy, development, democracy, and defense.”

Alongside the aim of helping Niger become an “increasingly capable partner against regional threats” was an emphasis on human rights, accountability, and “inclusive and sustainable economic growth.”

There were reasons to think that the strategy was beginning to work. Niger’s economic growth last year was running at an encouraging 11.5%.

Stephanie Lecocq/Reuters

A demonstrator holds a Nigerien flag outside Niger's Embassy in Paris supporting President Mohamed Bazoum, who was overthrown in a military coup on July 26.

President Mohamed Bazoum, who is reportedly now under house arrest, had been elected two years earlier in the country’s first peaceful transfer of power since independence from France in 1960. He had overseen a range of new programs on issues ranging from education to gender equality, while Niger’s U.S.-trained special forces were managing to curb the level of insurgent violence.

Yet when push came to coup – not over policy, but in a personal tug of war between Mr. Bazoum and the head of his presidential security force – the sheer weight of the day-to-day burdens borne by one of the poorest countries on Earth, combined with growing Sahel-wide resentment of France’s postcolonial influence, meant very few people were ready to take a stand in the president’s defense.

The concern now in Washington and Paris – as well as in neighboring Nigeria and other African countries – is that the whole of the Sahel will go the way of states like Mali.

There, the leaders of a 2020 coup replaced a decadelong anti-terror operation by French troops with 1,000 Wagner mercenaries. Since then, as in other Moscow-backed Sahel states, insurgent violence has grown. And Wagner forces have used brutal force not only against the jihadis, but against civilians as well.

While Washington failed in its attempts immediately after the July 26 coup to get Mr. Bazoum reinstated, senior officials this week redoubled efforts to see whether they could broker some kind of compromise between the coup leader, Gen. Abdourahamane Tiani, and the ousted president.

Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland flew into the capital, Niamey, on Monday and put that proposal to one of General Tiani’s top lieutenants, Moussa Salaou Barmou, former head of the country’s U.S.-backed special forces. But Ms. Nuland told reporters he had shown no sign of being receptive. And she failed to secure a meeting with President Bazoum, or with General Tiani himself.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken weighed in, using an interview with the BBC to try at least to limit the scale of the political upheaval.

He urged the coup leaders to rethink reported plans to bring in Wagner mercenaries. In other African countries where they’ve been operating, he said, “death, destruction, and exploitation have followed. Insecurity has gone up, not down.”

Yet his core hope will still be to salvage the alternative pattern of governance for the Sahel – pairing effective military action against Islamist insurgents with social and economic reform – for which Niger was meant to be a model.

Whether that vision survives the upheaval in Niger still hangs in the balance.

When South African Eddie Ndopu received a scholarship from Oxford University in England, he was thrilled. But he was also worried: As a wheelchair user, how would he fare in a place paved in cobblestones, where many of the buildings were constructed well before the 20th century?

Mr. Ndopu is able to move “one good finger,” and he relies on an assistant 24/7. Despite the challenges, he has worked with Amnesty International and is currently the youngest person serving as a sustainable development goals advocate with the United Nations.

His new book, “Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw: Reimagining Success as a Disabled Achiever,” recounts the challenges and triumphs of his experience living with a disability at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. He spoke recently with the Monitor.

Was this book an outgrowth of your master’s thesis at Oxford?

I knew I wanted to produce something on disability and public policy. I wanted to figure out what needs to go in my toolbox as an advocate in order to better understand policy, better inform how policy gets made.

The irony is that I ended up learning more from my lived experience than I did from the classroom. It’s not what I’d expected and it’s instructive, but also there’s a deeper injustice and unfairness there. I wanted to go to Oxford so that I could have a sabbatical from my life and just enjoy living a life of the mind, delving into concepts and having the opportunity for intellectual curiosity. Instead, my life became the case study where I had to dissect my experiences and offer them up for academic inquiry.

My thesis was around the limits of compliance-based thinking, the limits of reasonable accommodation – a concept that has really been at the cornerstone of international disability policy. I really had to come to terms with the fact that I felt a visceral opposition to reasonable accommodation. It just felt insufficient as an analytical framework to accord people with disabilities the kind of dignity that we need. 

The thesis of my life is the argument that if we get free as disabled people, then we all get free. If we can accord the most marginalized, the most vulnerable among us, freedom and agency, then we all benefit; there’s a ripple effect. If we provide the care and the resources and the investment in the most marginalized among us, then that benefits us, too. Because when we find ourselves in a position where we need to contend with the fragility of our own lives, of our own bodies, then we are prepared for that. We can take comfort in knowing that the systems and ecosystem exist to care for everybody. And I think that’s really the point.

You endured indignities at Oxford, and the book demonstrates that even a well-endowed, well-intentioned institution is not always prepared to include people with disabilities. Has anyone in the university’s administration read the book, and have you gotten any comments from them?

So far as I know, no. It will be quite interesting to see what the feedback will be.

I hope that the way I’ve written the book, it’s clear that it’s certainly an indictment [of] Oxford, but I think Oxford is a microcosm of institutional life writ large. I tried to make the point that you could swap Oxford out for any organization or institution, and people with disabilities will probably have similar experiences to share about the ways in which they’ve experienced institutional life and the ways in which compliance and the language of reasonable accommodation have continued to fail people with disabilities in so many ways. So, I hope that Oxford officials, when they sit down to read the book – if they read the book at all – that they will see it as an invitation rather than an admonishment in terms of thinking about how they can take the task of making the institution more open, accessible, and inclusive seriously. That would be my hope.

You went to undergraduate school at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Did you experience the same challenges there?

Carleton was an eye-opening experience for me in the same way that Oxford was, but different, in the sense that Carleton had its own dedicated attendant services program – other students looking for work were trained to provide care for students with disabilities living in residence. It was a 24-hour program, they were on call, and they worked in shifts. It was truly a mind-blowing experience for me because this program truly embraced the social model of disability in the sense that this was not an institutionalized setting in the medical sense of the word. This was a practice in what it could look like for students with disabilities to be truly integrated into the university. The ethos of independent living, of autonomy, of agency, all of this was practiced on a day-to-day basis through this program. 

I was incredibly lucky to have had that exposure when I did because it provided a template for me as far as knowing what is truly possible. That’s why Oxford was particularly surprising and heartbreaking, because I knew that what I was yearning for was not impossible, because I experienced glimpses of this in my undergraduate years.

Akan Nelson/Hachette Book Group

Mr. Ndopu celebrates his 2017 graduation from Oxford University. He says he learned more from his lived experiences as a scholar with disabilities than he absorbed from the studies.

How do you stay resilient?

The older I’m getting, the more I hope that I will be able to graduate from having to be resilient. I think that resilience is officially outdated. I do think this is the next frontier of our advocacy work. We need to hold space for people with disabilities to feel everything – to feel tired, to feel exhausted, to feel drained, which is what I constantly feel.

This book for me is my anti-grit memoir, because grit is wonderful. I am where I am because of grit. But grit on its own is an insufficient tool for liberation and equality. We can’t put all the onus on the individual in the absence of thinking about systemic reform. I’m changing society. And I think that I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I don’t want to be resilient anymore. I want to have joy. I want to be a little bit frivolous. I want to live my life. That’s what keeps me going. At the fundamental level, I love life. I don’t think that has anything to do with my disability, but I want to experience everything. I want to be awake and alert and to live as fully as I possibly can. 

Until I feel like I am filled up, I’m just going to keep wanting more. It’s really a profound yearning and appreciation for living.