Health effects of heat vulnerability in Rio de Janeiro: a validation model for policy applications

Abstract

Extreme heat events can lead to increased risk of heat-related deaths. Furthermore, urban areas are often hotter than their rural surroundings, exacerbating heat waves. Unfortunately, validation is difficult; to our knowledge, most validations, even if they control for temperatures, really only validate a social vulnerability index instead of a heat vulnerability index. Here we investigate how to construct and validate a heat vulnerability index given uncertainty ranges in data for the city of Rio de Janeiro. First, we compare excess deaths of certain types of circulatory diseases during heat waves. Second, we use demographic and environmental data and factor analysis to construct a set of unobserved factors and respective weightings related to heat vulnerability, including a Monte Carlo analysis to represent the uncertainty ranges assigned to the input data. Finally, we use distance to hospital and clinics and their health record data as an instrumental variable to validate our factors. We find that we can validate the Rio de Janeiro heat vulnerability index against excess deaths during heat waves; specifically, we use three types of regressions coupled with difference in difference calculations to show this is indeed a heat vulnerability index as opposed to a social vulnerability index. The factor analysis identifies two factors that contribute to >70% of the variability in the data; one socio-economic factor and one urban form factor. This suggests it is necessary to add a step to existing methods for validation of heat vulnerability indices, that of the difference-in-difference calculation.

Drought–heatwave nexus in Brazil and related impacts on health and fires: A comprehensive review

“…The understanding of the potential impacts of CDHW events on public health in Brazil is still far from satisfactory, despite the widespread efforts to quantify the impacts of droughts 34,107,108,112 and HWs 21,119,[123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133] from the perspective of a single climate extreme.…”

“…[116][117][118][119][120][121][122] By contrast, most of the HW-related studies in Brazil mainly focus on public health impacts. 21,119,[123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133] Besides health-related studies in the country, a few studies show HW impacts on agriculture, 134 food production, 135 and fires. 33 The overwhelming majority of health-related assessments address HWs and excess deaths, although the results are mainly limited to the southeastern Brazilian states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.…”

“…Compared to drought events, relatively few studies in Brazil have focused on HW modeling and interpretation, with the majority of these published since 2011 116–122 . By contrast, most of the HW‐related studies in Brazil mainly focus on public health impacts 21,119,123–133 . Besides health‐related studies in the country, a few studies show HW impacts on agriculture, 134 food production, 135 and fires 33 .…”

Understanding Urban Heat Vulnerability Assessment Methods: A PRISMA Review

“…Varying heat vulnerability models has been built by combining different types of heatrelated indicators to identify vulnerable populations, areas exposed to increased extreme heat [22,23] and assess the spatiotemporal distributions to provide policy directions for policymakers [24,25]. Boumans et al [13] developed a modelling and support platform for climate change and applied it to examine how heat stress influenced heat-related illness and death.…”

Os Estudos De Clima Urbano E O Seu Desenvolvimento Na Cidade Do Recife - Pe: Campos De Estudo, Técnicas De Investigação E Perspectivas Futuras

“…Isto confirma o exposto porMills (2014), ou seja, que os estudos de clima urbano e aqueles que envolvem as cidades em estudos de mudanças climáticas procedem em um caminho paralelo e precisam de mais interação. PROSDOCIMI eKLIMA, 2020;SAMUELSON et al, 2020). Por fim, Khan, Chatterjee e Weng (2021b) listam os pontos-chave para a realização das pesquisas de clima urbano nas cidades tropicais, apresentados no Quadro 1, as quais variam desde a compreensão das variáveis do saldo de radiação na superfície até a organização de programas de mitigação em conjunto com a conscientização da população.Quadro 1 -Os pontos-chave das pesquisas de ICU nas cidades tropicais.…”