A Literature Review of the Impacts of Heat Stress on Human Health across Africa

Abstract

Heat stress-related illness attributed to the changing climate, particularly the more frequent extreme high temperatures, is becoming a theme of public concern, especially in the most vulnerable regions, such as the African continent. Knowledge of the existing research directions and gaps on heat stress and human health is vital for informing future strategic research foci capable of influencing policy development, planning, adaptation, and mitigation efforts. In this regard, a bibliometric analysis was conducted, with an emphasis on Africa, to assess regional research contributions to heat stress impacts on human health. The goals of the study were to review publication growth and patterns of the scientific publications and to identify key players (especially collaborating institutions and countries) and the evolution of research themes on the African continent, while paying attention to global trends and emergent hot topics and methodology of heat stress research. Using the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus core collection databases, a structured keyword search was undertaken, which yielded 463 and 58 research publications from around the world and Africa, respectively. The retrieved scientific documents, published between 1968 and 2020, were analyzed and visualized using a bibliometric analysis technique and the VOSviewer software tool. The results indicate low statistics and slow scientific growth in publication output, with the highest peak having been reached in 2018, resulting in 13 scientific publications. While global research collaborations are successfully reflected in the literature, there is a considerable gap in understanding heat stress and related collaborations between African countries and international institutions. The review study has identified key opportunities that can benefit Africa through the expansion of the scope of heat stress and human health research on the continent. These opportunities can be achieved by closing the following research gaps: (1) vulnerability assessments within demographic classes, such as the elderly, (2) personal exposure and associated risks, (3) Urban Heat Island (UHI) evaluation for urban environments, and (4) heat adaptation research, which will enable informed and targeted preventive actions that will limit future heat health impacts. The authors opine that the pursuit of such studies will be most impactful if the current knowledge gaps are bridged through transdisciplinary research supported by local, regional, and international collaborators.

Spatiotemporal characteristics of human thermal comfort across southern Africa: An analysis of the Universal Thermal Climate Index for 1971–2021

“…Compared to regions at a similar latitude, such as the Caribbean (Di Napoli et al ., 2022) and Southern Hemisphere subtropics (Pappenberger et al ., 2015), southern Africa experiences a relatively similar thermal UTCI climatology. Although these subtropical regions widely experience cold stress, especially during winter, heat stress is more extensive, particularly during summer months when it is challenging to adapt and mitigate against heat stress (Pappenberger et al ., 2015; Ncongwane et al ., 2021; Wright et al ., 2022).…”

“…For leisure, local and international tourists are primarily attracted to outdoor features such as beaches, hiking trails and nature‐based tourism (Saarien et al ., 2022). Therefore, while thermal conditions in southern Africa are on average largely classified as thermophysiologically acceptable by global standards, they, and especially the large degree of day‐time heat stress and night‐time cold stress experienced, might not be suitable in the context of a population spending more time outdoors, and with less infrastructural amelioration; with less infrastructural amelioration, and due to limited availability of resources, day‐time activities (and in particular those outdoors) have limited availability of adaptation and mitigation strategies against heat stress, for instance (Ncongwane et al ., 2021). There may, thus, be a need for more regional‐specific tuning of the UTCI thermal classifications to consider the thermal comfort of people taking part in activities more common to southern Africa; as has been suggested for China (Ge et al ., 2017) and South Korea (Shin et al ., 2022), and similar to the regional‐specific tuning undertaken in Belo Horizonte city in southeastern Brazil (Silva and Hirashima, 2021).…”

“…This can result in heat‐ or cold‐related illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases, strokes, severe headaches, damage to the brain, heart, lungs, and kidneys, decreased metabolic activity, and in severe cases mortality (Scott, 2015; Smith and Sheridan, 2018; van der Walt and Fitchett, 2021a; 2021b; 2022). Furthermore, underlying and pre‐existing medical conditions (e.g., asthma, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases) are exacerbated by extreme heat and cold exposure (Scott, 2015; Smith and Sheridan, 2018; Ncongwane et al ., 2021). Under warming climates, the incidence of extreme climate events is increasing, with notable impacts on human morbidity and mortality (Masson‐Delmotte et al ., 2021).…”

An overview of climate change adaptation and mitigation research in Africa

“…An issue that needs to be noticed is that despite the increasing concerns about extreme heat and its impacts on human health, related terms did not emerge from the term co-occurrence analysis. This indicates the lack of research on this issue as also highlighted in other studies (Harrington and Otto, 2020;Ncongwane et al, 2021). More research on the adaptation to extreme heat in the context of Africa is, therefore, needed.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Solar Energy Forecasting Studies in Africa

“…The WoS and Scopus are considered the main and largest core collection databases, housing peer-reviewed scientific data, including articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. In this regard, the two selected database sources of scientific documents have been extensively used in bibliometric review studies, covering a wide range of scientific disciplines and subdisciplines, such as health [18], water-energy-food nexus [19], drought [20], flood risk assessment [21], climate-smart agriculture [22], and environmental risk and impacts [23], among others. The current paper scaled up the methodology to solar energy forecasting research.…”