Climate Change and Health Risks from Extreme Heat and Air Pollution in the Eastern United States

Climate change will exacerbate health risks through exposures to extreme heat and air pollution through both direct and indirect mechanisms.  Directly, warmer temperatures promote biogenic emissions of ozone precursors and favor the formation of ground-level ozone, while increases in the frequency of stagnant air masses will allow fine particulate matter to accumulate.  Indirectly, warmer summertime temperatures stimulate energy demand and exacerbate polluting emissions.  While technological adaptations such as air conditioning can reduce risks from exposures to extreme heat, they can trigger downstream damage to air quality and public health.

We quantify the impacts of climate change on ambient temperatures, summer energy demand, air quality, and public health in the eastern United States.  The first phase of this work explores how climate change will directly impact the burden of heat-related mortality.  In the second phase of work, we carry out analyses to estimate the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on air pollution (ozone and fine particulate matter).

With the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program, we estimate health risks using concentration-response functions, which relate increases in ambient temperature and air pollution levels to changes in disease incidence and mortality rates. We compare mid-century summertime climate data to 2007 baseline conditions at a 12 km resolution in order to estimate the population health burden attributable to climate change.

The average summer temperature by mid-century will rise 4.7° C (compared to 2007) and that the minimum summer temperature will rise 2.1° C over the same period.  Warmer average temperatures are expected to cause 173 additional deaths due to cardiovascular stress, while higher minimum temperatures will cause 67 additional deaths.  We quantify air pollution-related health impacts in the second phase of work.  This research represents a novel framework for risk assessment in populations facing linked air quality-energy-health risks.