Mapping Community Determinants of Heat Vulnerability

By C. Reid, M. O'Neill, C. Gronlund, Shannon J. Brines, Daniel G. Brown, Ana V. Diez-Roux, Jasmine Schwartz. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2008

756 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The evidence that heat waves can result in both increased deaths and illness is substantial, and concern over this issue is rising because of climate change. Adverse health impacts from heat waves can be avoided, and epidemiologic studies have identified specific population and community characteristics that mark vulnerability to heat waves. Objectives We situated vulnerability to heat in geographic space and identified potential areas for intervention and further research. Methods We mapped and analyzed 10 vulnerability factors for heat-related morbidity/mortality in the United States: six demographic characteristics and two household air conditioning variables from the U.S. Census Bureau, vegetation cover from satellite images, and diabetes prevalence from a national survey. We performed a factor analysis of these 10 variables and assigned values of increasing vulnerability for the four resulting factors to each of 39,794 census tracts. We added the four factor scores to obtain a cumulative heat vulnerability index value. Results Four factors explained > 75% of the total variance in the original 10 vulnerability variables: a) social/environmental vulnerability (combined education/poverty/race/green space), b) social isolation, c) air conditioning prevalence, and d) proportion elderly/diabetes. We found substantial spatial variability of heat vulnerability nationally, with generally higher vulnerability in the Northeast and Pacific Coast and the lowest in the Southeast. In urban areas, inner cities showed the highest vulnerability to heat. Conclusions These methods provide a template for making local and regional heat vulnerability maps. After validation using health outcome data, interventions can be targeted at the most vulnerable populations.

Subfields: Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Physiology

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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Citations in the corpus

Climate vulnerability mapping: A systematic review and future prospects (2019, background): “…& Herrero, 2010) and health impacts such as malaria (Hagenlocher & Castro, 2015), dengue (Dickin, Schuster-Wallace, & Elliott, 2013), extreme heat (Reid et al., 2009; Weber, Sadoff, Zell, & de Sherbinin, 2015), and food insecurity (Kok et al., 2010; Thornton et al., 2008; van Wesenbeeck,…”
Connecting people and place: a new framework for reducing urban vulnerability to extreme heat (2010, methodology): “Geographic analysis of social vulnerability to extreme heat has been commonly conducted using aggregate Census-based demographic and socio-economic information (Smoyer 1998, Vescovi et al 2005, Reid et al 2009, Johnson et al 2009).”
Climate Change Trends and Impacts on California Agriculture: A Detailed Review (2018, background): “People, especially along the coast, that lack air conditioning are vulnerable during extreme heat events [24,25].”
Improving health through policies that promote active travel: a review of evidence to support integrated health impact assessment. (2011, neutral): “temperatures (Reid et al., 2009).”