Temperature, Human Health, and Adaptation: A Review of the Empirical Literature

By Olivier Deschênes. 2014

333 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a survey of the empirical literature studying the relationship between health outcomes, temperature, and adaptation to temperature extremes. The objective of the paper is to highlight the many remaining gaps in the empirical literature and to provide guidelines for improving the current Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) literature that seeks to incorporate human health and adaptation in its framework. I begin by presenting the conceptual and methodological issues associated with the measurement of the effect of temperature extremes on health, and the role of adaptation in possibly muting these effects. The main conclusion that emerges from the literature is that despite the wide variety of data sets and settings most studies find that temperature extremes lead to significant reductions in health, generally measured with excess mortality. Regarding the role of adaptation in mitigating the effects of extreme temperature on health, the available knowledge is limited, in part due to the lack of real-world data on measures of adaptation behaviors. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the currently available evidence for assessments of potential human health impacts of global climate change.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed4c2fe0a0175efe2d4570116ce67aab1f05b1c1

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In General Health Professions

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Citations in the corpus

The impact of climate conditions on economic production. Evidence from a global panel of regions (2020, background): “, 2014; Carleton and Hsiang, 2016), human well-being (Patz et al., 2005; Hsiang et al., 2013; Deschenes, 2014) and functioning of ecosystems (Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno, 2010; IPCC, 2014).”
Population health effects and health-related costs of extreme temperatures: Comprehensive evidence from Germany (2018, methodology): “Basu and Samet (2002), Åström et al. (2011), Deschênes (2014) and Hondula et al. (2015) provide literature reviews on the relationship between heat events and human health.”
What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature (2014, positive): “31 The review in this section is highly complementary with Deschênes (2012), which is focused exclusively on the relationship between temperature and health.”
Quantifying the economic risks of climate change (2017, background): “dynamics in an explicit or credible manner (Deschenes, 2014; Hitz & Smith, 2004; Howard, 2014; IAWG, 2010; Li, Mullan, & Helgeson, 2014; Revesz et al., 2014; Sussman et al., 2014; Warren et al., 2006).”