COP29 HEAT STRESS: OVERVIEW
DANGEROUS URBAN HEAT EXPOSURE HAS TRIPLED SINCE THE 1980S, WITH THE POOR MOST AT RISK
Nearly one-quarter of the global population live in urban areas where extreme heat exposure has risen By Cascade Tuholske, Chris Funk and Kathryn Grace*
E xtreme urban heat exposure has dramatically increased since the early 1980s, with the total exposure tripling over the past 35 years. Today, about 1.7 billion people, nearly one- quarter of the global population, live in urban areas where extreme heat exposure has risen. Most reports on urban heat exposure are based on broad estimates that overlook millions of at-risk residents. We looked closer. Using satellite estimates of where every person on the planet lived each year from 1983 to 2016,
we counted the number of days per year that people in over 13,000 urban areas were exposed to extreme heat. The results were released on October 4, 2021. The story that emerges is one of rapidly increasing heat exposure, with poor and marginalized people particularly at risk. Nearly two-thirds of the global increase in urban exposure to extreme heat was in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. This is in part because of climate change and the urban heat island effect – temperatures in urban areas are
* Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. https://theconversation.com/dangerous-urban-heat-exposure-has-tripled-since-the-1980s-with-the-poor-most-at-risk-169153
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