Assessing Societal Response to Extreme Temperature Shocks

Climate projections suggest greatly increased exposure to heat, and they have recently been outpaced by record-shattering heat events. Not all physical mechanisms are understood, and many open questions remain on the coordinated and uncoordinated human responses to record-breaking events. Insights into societal reactions to such outlier records are important for designing adaptation strategies, and for anticipating societal dynamics.

We hypothesize heat extremes trigger societal response. Therefore, we design a statistical framework to explore heat record exceedance in recent decades and combine it with socioeconomic impact and response data to elucidate event-response relationships. More specifically, we assess air conditioning uptake in Europe and heat-health impacts. As meteorological baseline we use daily maximum temperature and compare it with annual air-conditioning data at country-level, global burden of disease reports, and socio-economic variables. We validate our hypothesis using both fixed effects regression models, and event coincidence analysis. We first find that while temperature records show a strong upward trend in entire Europe, the occurrence of large temperature record exceedance is spatially heterogeneous. Fixed effects analyses show a statistically significant effect of highest temperature and gross-domestic product on air-conditioning uptake. They also highlight the importance of a one-year time lag between highest temperature and the air-conditioning data. Further, event coincidence analysis points at an impact of single heat events on air-conditioning uptake.

Overall, our results show promising insights into an issue that is of urgent societal importance in the face of new records. Insights into the driving role of single record-breaking events are very valuable for informing adaptation measures, wider policies, but also early warning systems and approaches related to anticipatory action.