Extreme heat exposure in cities across the world has tripled since 1980s, study shows
CTV
Extreme heat exposure in cities has tripled since the early 1980s, with lower-income and marginalized people particularly at risk, a new study shows.
“The story that emerges is one of rapidly increasing heat exposure, with poor and marginalized people particularly at risk,” the authors said in an article in The Conversation about their findings.
The team, who published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America last week, used satellite data from 1983 to 2016 and counted the number of days per year that people in 13,000 urban areas around the globe were exposed to extreme heat.
Authors attributed the spike in extreme heat exposure in cities to a number of factors, including climate change and the “heat Island effect” – a phenomenon in which temperatures in urban areas are higher due to human activities and types of materials used in roads and buildings.
“Increased extreme heat exposure from both climate change and the urban heat island effect threatens rapidly growing urban settlements worldwide,” the authors said in their study.