Extreme heatwaves across Europe in recent years have killed tens of thousands of people, but as the death toll rises, researchers are finding that it is the poor who are suffering the most from extreme heat.
“It's common sense,” said Julio Díaz Jiménez, a research professor at Madrid's Carlos III Health Institute. “A heat wave when you're in a room with three other people and there's no air conditioning is different from a heat wave when you're in a villa with a pool and air conditioning.”
Díaz Jiménez is part of a group of researchers who looked at how the heatwave affected 17 Madrid neighbourhoods, and a study published in 2020 found that the heatwave affected mortality rates in just three neighbourhoods with below-average household income.
They carried out a similar analysis in communities across Spain, “and we found the same thing,” he says: “When it comes to heat and vulnerability, income level is an important factor.”
Low-income people often struggle to access quality housing, and many live in overcrowded, poorly ventilated housing with few places to escape the heat. Some struggle to access proper medical care, whose symptoms may be exacerbated by extreme heat, and some work in sectors such as agriculture and construction where they are regularly exposed to high temperatures.
Even where air conditioning is available, low-income families are less likely to be able to afford it: Save the Children warned earlier this year that one in three children in Spain cannot stay cool at home, which it said could have a “highly detrimental” impact on the mental and physical health of more than two million children.
The relationship between heatstroke and poverty has long been a topic of discussion on the other side of the Atlantic, but it has become even more of a topic since a 2019 study by National Public Radio and the University of Maryland documented that low-income areas across the country are more likely to get hotter than wealthier ones.
But the discussion has been slower to pick up in Europe, a continent that is warming much faster than other parts of the world, said Yamina Saheb, lead author of the IPCC report on climate change mitigation.
She pointed to a study published this month that found that heatwaves caused by carbon pollution killed about 50,000 people across Europe last year. “We need to sound the alarm that this is an extremely urgent issue,” said Saheb, who is also a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. “We need to decide that this is the last time that people die from heatwaves in European countries.”
Heatwaves across the continent have been hotter, longer and more frequent in recent years, making 2023 the hottest year on record, and scientists predict 2024 will soon beat that record as well.
“Global warming is killing people,” Saheb said. “The question for me is, how many people does it take for policymakers, advocates and experts to understand that summer energy poverty is a big problem?”
Saheb has long been lobbying policymakers to make access to air conditioning a right, in contrast to its current status as a consumer good. “For consumers, access to air conditioning is tied to income,” he says. “This increases inequality.”
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Lower incomes also mean people have less say in where they live, making them more likely to live in asphalt-dominated areas with fewer trees and green spaces, says Albí Duarte Rocha, a researcher at the Technical University of Berlin.
Duarte Rocha was recently part of a research team that looked at 14 major cities across Europe. From Berlin to Budapest, they found a consistent pattern: low-income residents had less access to green spaces that could naturally cool the city. In contrast, higher-income residents had above-average access to these spaces.
Duarte Rocha said the phenomenon can be explained in part by “green gentrification,” where lush areas are in higher demand than more densely populated, concrete-ridden neighborhoods, but the result is often lower-income residents being pushed out of the city's coolest areas.
He called on policymakers and politicians to view cooling as a service that should be provided, just like public transport or street cleaning, and to focus on areas where such spaces are in short supply, with measures ranging from planting trees to installing green building facades.
This would be a small step towards correcting “a pattern of environmental injustice,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves why the groups of people who are least responsible for climate change are the ones most susceptible to its impacts.”
