Extreme temperatures in urban areas: assessment of inequalities looking at high-resolution climate data and vulnerabilities associated with socioeconomic factors and the built environment

Abstract

Severe increases in temperature are projected in European regions, with more intense and prolonged extreme events for cities located in the Mediterranean Basin. Due to anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, the average annual temperature in Italy increases by 1.1°C since 1980. In this regard, evaluate the context specific health vulnerabilities to temperatures in cities is essential, reason why it is largely reflected in the to date literature state-of-the-art. However, little is known about the risk evolution of temperature-mortality associations looking at social inequalities and built environment characteristics. Therefore, the main scope of this PhD thesis is to investigate trends in cold- and heat- mortality risk and burden by socio-economic factors, through the development of a flexible and validated methodology that can be reproduced in other urban contexts. The case study of this research is based on a record-linkage time series of the city of Turin, from 1982 to 2018. Overall, results demonstrated an increase in risk trends under both cold and heat conditions, highlighting heterogeneous associations across different factors influencing the population vulnerability to extreme burden of temperatures. A better understanding on how the most vulnerable population sub-groups have adapted at the urban and at the sub-urban scale to cold and heat in the last decades it is essential to improve public awareness, health care and social services, but also to prevent risks using targeted public health responses to adapt to future extreme temperature events due to climate change impacts.