Adapting to a warming climate: electricity demand, air conditioning, and the health impacts of extreme heat
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Citation
Abstract
The increasing incidence and intensity of days and spells of extreme heat is expected to continue with climate change, with interconnected and cascading consequences across multiple scales and sectors. In particular, high temperature exposures directly affect population health (e.g., increased risk of hospitalization and death) and cooling energy demand (i.e., the use of residential air conditioning (AC) as adaptation). Heat extremes are often amplified in urban areas due to the thermodynamic properties of the built environment. While we have a strong understanding of the relationship between heat and energy demand, energy and AC, and the impacts of heat on morbidity and mortality, there remain notable knowledge gaps in the dynamics that underpin these relationships, and only a handful of studies are able to explore their linkages together, especially at fine spatial scales. In this dissertation, I combine econometric and epidemiological methods to provide further insights into several dimensions of the intersection of heat, electricity, AC, and health in urban populations, and holistically assess these linked relationships together. In my first chapter, I characterize the response of urban electricity demand to temperature at fine temporal resolution across a subset of world cities, and quantify the impacts of future heat adaptation on net and peak energy demand under mid-century warming. Temperature-demand response functions and future demand impacts are heterogeneous across temperate and tropical cities, highlighting the important role that the structure of electricity demand plays alongside distributional temperature shifts in evaluating the impacts of climate change on future energy demand. In my second chapter, I construct fine spatial resolution estimates of any residential AC across a large set of US metropolitan areas. Inter-urban availability of AC exhibits a strong latitudinal gradient, while intra-urban AC is systematically unequally distributed within cities. This inequality is also negatively correlated with social vulnerability (SVI) and surface urban heat island intensity (SUHI), suggesting that differential AC compounds existing heat health disparities. In my third chapter, I additionally compute individual and ZCTA-level estimates of AC use on extreme heat days alongside individual probability of AC in California cities, and evaluate the differences in the moderating effects of these related attributes of heat vulnerability on heat-related hospital admissions. AC prevalence and AC use are correlated, but both measures of adaptation are only weakly correlated with social vulnerability within cities. The spatial distribution of health risks from extreme heat echoes spatial patterns of increasing social vulnerability, and both AC prevalence and use significantly modify the association between extreme heat and a number of health outcomes. However, effect estimates differ between AC prevalence and AC use, suggesting that AC ownership does not necessarily reflect AC usage, and, crucially, that there remain additional unobserved dynamics driving the heat-adaptation-health relationship. Identifying the underlying factors and determinants of population heat health vulnerability at the local scales in which impacts and adaptation decisions take place is necessary as cities and municipalities develop and refine heat resilience policies and climate adaptation strategies aimed at reducing heat health inequities and improving community well-being.
Description
2023
License
Attribution 4.0 International