Climate change activism has raised awareness about concerns all over the globe: shrinking glaciers, interruptions in ecosystems, extreme weather patterns, just to name a few. But there are pressing concerns right in our own neighborhoods directly affecting public health. For example, the COVID-19 crisis is more heavily affecting communities with high air pollution. And now, a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health has revealed that heat advisories in the City of Boston resulted in an increase in medical emergencies in neighborhoods with higher ground surface temperatures.
Prof. Dan O’Brien and a team of researchers recently studied urban heat islets, or urban areas with higher temperatures during heat waves. They discovered that even from street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood, temperatures can vary at an alarming rate. Furthermore, there were 10% more emergency calls on heat advisory days in these higher-temperature areas for conditions such as cardiac arrest, serious illness and seizures. To conduct the analysis, neighborhood tracts were broken down into 30-meter squares. The team tracked 911 calls over a period of approximately 3.5 years, during which there were 25 heat advisory days from June to September.
These results raise awareness for both policymakers and citizens to anticipate and prepare for these urban heat islets and other future climate-related threats.
Read the full study here.
