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Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities

Urban heat stress poses a major risk to public health. Case studies of individual cities suggest that heat exposure, like other environmental stressors, may be unequally distributed across income groups. There is little evidence, however, as to whether such disparities are pervasive. We combine surf...

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Autores principales: Hsu, Angel, Sheriff, Glenn, Chakraborty, Tirthankar, Manya, Diego
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8149665/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34035248
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22799-5
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author Hsu, Angel
Sheriff, Glenn
Chakraborty, Tirthankar
Manya, Diego
author_facet Hsu, Angel
Sheriff, Glenn
Chakraborty, Tirthankar
Manya, Diego
author_sort Hsu, Angel
collection PubMed
description Urban heat stress poses a major risk to public health. Case studies of individual cities suggest that heat exposure, like other environmental stressors, may be unequally distributed across income groups. There is little evidence, however, as to whether such disparities are pervasive. We combine surface urban heat island (SUHI) data, a proxy for isolating the urban contribution to additional heat exposure in built environments, with census tract-level demographic data to answer these questions for summer days, when heat exposure is likely to be at a maximum. We find that the average person of color lives in a census tract with higher SUHI intensity than non-Hispanic whites in all but 6 of the 175 largest urbanized areas in the continental United States. A similar pattern emerges for people living in households below the poverty line relative to those at more than two times the poverty line.
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spelling pubmed-81496652021-06-01 Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities Hsu, Angel Sheriff, Glenn Chakraborty, Tirthankar Manya, Diego Nat Commun Article Urban heat stress poses a major risk to public health. Case studies of individual cities suggest that heat exposure, like other environmental stressors, may be unequally distributed across income groups. There is little evidence, however, as to whether such disparities are pervasive. We combine surface urban heat island (SUHI) data, a proxy for isolating the urban contribution to additional heat exposure in built environments, with census tract-level demographic data to answer these questions for summer days, when heat exposure is likely to be at a maximum. We find that the average person of color lives in a census tract with higher SUHI intensity than non-Hispanic whites in all but 6 of the 175 largest urbanized areas in the continental United States. A similar pattern emerges for people living in households below the poverty line relative to those at more than two times the poverty line. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-05-25 /pmc/articles/PMC8149665/ /pubmed/34035248 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22799-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Hsu, Angel
Sheriff, Glenn
Chakraborty, Tirthankar
Manya, Diego
Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title_full Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title_fullStr Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title_full_unstemmed Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title_short Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities
title_sort disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major us cities
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8149665/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34035248
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22799-5
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