© 2007 American Public Health Association DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2006.102947
At the time the research was completed, Kim Knowlton and Patrick L. Kinney were with the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY. Barry Lynn, Richard A. Goldberg, and Cynthia Rosenzweig were with the Center for Climate Systems Research, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University, New York. Christian Hogrefe was with the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, University at Albany, Albany, NY. Joyce Klein Rosenthal was with the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Kim Knowlton, DrPH, Science Fellow on Global Warming and Health, Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 West 20th St, New York, NY 10011 (e-mail: kknowlton{at}nrdc.org).
Objectives. We sought to project future impacts of climate change on summer heat-related premature deaths in the New York City metropolitan region. Methods. Current and future climates were simulated over the northeastern United States with a global-to-regional climate modeling system. Summer heat-related premature deaths in the 1990s and 2050s were estimated by using a range of scenarios and approaches to modeling acclimatization (e.g., increased use of air conditioning, gradual physiological adaptation). Results. Projected regional increases in heat-related premature mortality by the 2050s ranged from 47% to 95%, with a mean 70% increase compared with the 1990s. Acclimatization effects reduced regional increases in summer heat-related premature mortality by about 25%. Local impacts varied considerably across the region, with urban counties showing greater numbers of deaths and smaller percentage increases than less-urbanized counties. Conclusions. Although considerable uncertainty exists in climate forecasts and future health vulnerability, the range of projections we developed suggests that by midcentury, acclimatization may not completely mitigate the effects of climate change in the New York City metropolitan region, which would result in an overall net increase in heat-related premature mortality.
Although a large body of retrospective studies1–7 provides evidence of acute associations between daily temperatures and premature deaths from many causes, additional tools are needed to anticipate the future effects of climate change on ambient temperatures and associated mortality. Over the 20th century, the average annual temperature in the United States increased by 1°F.8 Temperatures in the 31-county metropolitan region centered around New York City have exceeded those national trends, with a 2°F warming trend between 1900 and 1997.9 Recent trends in anthropogenic emissions and their modeled impacts on global climate strongly suggest that both emissions and warming trends will continue to affect atmospheric processes into the 21st century.10 Annual average temperatures for the region in the 2050s have been projected to rise by 2.5°F to 6.5°F, with summer temperature increases of 2.7°F to 7.6°F.9 Cities such as New York may be at particular risk from climate change because the urban heat island further augments regional temperature increases.11 Urban heat islands are created when human-made surfaces in cities made of concrete, asphalt, metal, and stone absorb incident sunlight during the day, which is re-radiated as heat, especially at night. This, along with few trees and vegetation to provide cooling, produces an overall effect of urban areas tending to have higher surface and near-surface air temperatures than surrounding suburban and rural areas.12 Some communities in densely populated urban centers are among those most vulnerable to heat.5,13–15 The diverse urban population of New York includes millions of residents 65 years and older or residents with cardiovascular or respiratory illness, risk factors that increase vulnerability to summer heat stress.1 Several recent studies have used climate models to project future heat-related mortality impacts of global warming, usually at relatively coarse spatial scales. A global climate model applied in the United Kingdom projected a 250% increase in annual heat-related deaths by the 2050s across 4 greenhouse gas scenarios.16 With a high-emission-change scenario in 6 temperate Australian cities, a 75% increase in annual heat-related mortality among people 65 years and older by 2050 was projected.17 A study in Portugal projected that summer heat-related deaths in Lisbon may increase by up to 6 times by the 2050s.18 A regional impacts study of California concluded that by the latter decades of the 21st century, summer heat-related mortality could be 2 to 7 times greater than it is now, even after taking possible heat acclimatization (e.g., increased use of air conditioning, gradual physiological adaptation) into account.19 General circulation models are global scale models that take into account the dynamics of physical processes in the atmosphere and oceans but at relatively coarse resolution. Hence, one cannot realistically use these models to address the need for locally relevant projections of the potential effects of global warming on public health. One approach to address this limitation is dynamical downscaling, in which the general circulation model outputs are used as initial and boundary conditions for finer-scale simulations by regional climate models. We used such a system, developed by the New York Climate and Health Project,20 to project daily mean temperatures at local scales for the 2050s and to evaluate potential impacts of climate change on summer heat-related mortality in the New York City metropolitan region.
Climate Modeling Meteorological fields were simulated on a 36-km grid over the study region for the 1990s and 2050s by coupling the Fifth-Generation National Center for Atmospheric Research/Penn State Mesoscale Model (MM5)21 to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) 4° x 5° resolution Global Atmosphere–Ocean Model (which produced the GISS–MM5 linked model system).22–24 To evaluate the GISS–MM5 model system, 108-km and 36-km grid resolution model outputs for the eastern United States in 5 summers of the 1990s were compared with 0.5° x 0.5° gridded observations for the same period. The model successfully captured the spatial patterns of observed summer temperatures.25 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has defined a range of possible future trends in greenhouse gas emissions that are based on alternative assumptions about changes in the economy, technology, demographics, and energy use.26 We selected 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change greenhouse gas scenarios, A2 and B2, which represent relatively high and low greenhouse gas growth projections, respectively. The A2 scenario assumes rapid human population growth, relatively weak environmental concerns, and a lack of aggressive greenhouse gas regulation, whereas the B2 scenario assumes more-moderate population growth and increased concerns about environmental sustainability. The A2 and B2 scenarios thus offer a range of possible future climate-related futures, and we used both to model daily climate in the 1990s and 2050s. The GISS–MM5 regional climate simulations were performed for 3-month "time-slices" for the summer months of June, July, and August within 5 consecutive mid-decade years (i.e., 1993–1997) of the 1990s and 2050s. The decision to model only 5 summers in each decade was based largely on computational constraints.
Mortality Risk Assessment
where H is daily heat-related deaths, P is the county population, M is the baseline county summer daily nonaccidental mortality rate (per 100 000 population), and ERC is the exposure–risk coefficient of mortality for a given change in same-day mean temperature exposure, as follows:
where b is the parameter estimate that reflects a 13.05% change in nonaccidental causes of mortality per 10°F change in daily mean temperature above a local threshold temperature of 73.54°F (F. Curriero, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, written communication, January 2003) for New York City, derived from a study of 11 eastern United States cities for the period 1973 through 1994,4 and For the 1990s and 2050s in each county, we projected daily heat-related premature deaths on 460 simulation days that represented 5 middecadal (years 3 through 7 of each decade) "summers" (June 1 through August 31; 92 days/summer x 5 summers). Four different risk estimates were computed, which corresponded to the A2 and B2 scenarios for the 2050s and 2 alternative approaches to simulate possible effects of future heat acclimatization. One approach assumed there will be no acclimatization and, thus, that the regional population response to heat stress over the coming century will be the same as that previously derived for the 1973–1994 New York City population.3,4 The second approach assumed that the regional population will partially "acclimatize" to warming temperatures through such measures as increased use of air conditioning, heat alerts, and cooling shelters, as well as by gradual physiological adaptation. We modeled this acclimatization by using a heat exposure–mortality response function4 derived from 2 US cities with current observed temperatures similar to those projected for the 2050s in the New York region (2050s A2 summer daily Tave = 76.7°F). Two cities had observed 1973–1994 mean summer temperatures3 within approximately 1°F of the projected 2050s temperatures for the study region: Washington, DC (mean 1973–1994 summer daily Tave = 75.7°F), and Atlanta, Ga (mean 1973–1994 summer daily Tave = 77.8°F). We calculated the mean value for the exposure–response function and temperature threshold from these 2 cities4 and applied the results in the heat–mortality risk assessment. Population totals for each of the 31 counties in the New York City metropolitan region, based on data obtained from the US Census 2000 survey,33 were held constant throughout the modeling period. Baseline (1990s) mortality rates for all ages and for International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9), codes from 0 to 799.9,34 which excluded deaths attributable to external causes, were computed as described in a separate paper,35 applying county-specific scaling factors to arrive at summer seasonal daily mortality rates, and were held constant over the analysis period.
Temperature Exposure Estimation Temperature exposures in future decades were estimated by adjusting 1990s observed temperatures with interdecadal differences derived from the GISS–MM5 model, an approach that assumes that model bias does not vary from one decade to the next. We first calculated monthly differences between future simulated temperatures in each decade and 1990s simulated temperatures. For example, the mean simulated temperature for the 5 Julys of the 1990s in a particular county was computed. This value was then subtracted from the mean simulated county temperature for the 5 Julys of the 2050s. This was done for each summer month of the decade, which produced decade-specific monthly differences in temperatures that resulted from climate change. Note that in the climate impacts field these differences are referred to as "anomalies." A more intuitive term, climate-induced difference, can be applied, where climate-induced difference is the month-, decade-, and county-specific difference calculated by subtracting the 1990s mean model-simulated temperature from the corresponding values for simulated future decades. To estimate temperature exposures in future decades, the month- and decade-specific climate-induced differences were added to the daily 1990s observations for each county.
At the county level, increases in summer heat-related premature mortality were projected across the entire study area by mid-century under the A2 and B2 climate change scenarios with and without acclimatization as described in Table 1
Figure 1
Local impacts varied geographically across the region, as shown in Figure 2
By using a global-to-regional climate modeling system, we found that the impacts of projected rising temperatures on local heat-related mortality may increase in both urban and nonurban counties surrounding New York City over the 21st century. The 36-km resolution GISS–MM5 model system provided a means to discern local patterns of potential climate impacts in future decades. This capability is especially important in a metropolitan region such as New York, where strong spatial gradients in population, demographics, and land use lead to corresponding gradients in temperature (i.e., the urban heat island), which puts specific populations within the city at greater risk than others. As our work illustrates, those counties currently experiencing the hottest summers are the highly urbanized counties in and around New York City, which also have the greatest population density, thus exposing millions of residents to periodic summer heat stress, which results in relatively high numbers of heat-related premature deaths.
The relatively large percentage of households who live in poverty or in older residential neighborhoods in New York City where multifamily rental buildings often do not have air conditioning may enhance urban population vulnerability to heat stress. Although temperatures are projected to warm considerably in the urban core by the 2050s, our global-to-regional model results suggest that the greatest incremental increases in mean daily temperatures will occur in the nonurban counties well beyond the city limits of the 5 boroughs of New York City. Figure 2 Overall, the results of this study are consistent with those of previous studies that have applied climate model projections in mortality assessments. A doubling in summer heat-related premature mortality relative to current levels falls within the range of values for the 2050s suggested for other cities in the United States19,37 and Europe.18 This is notable because these different studies applied regional climate models and general circulation models in different regions of the world and for different human populations. This convergence of results lends credence to projected heat-related impacts of climate change. Future acclimatization to rising temperatures and resulting heat stress is likely to reduce the heat mortality impacts.38,39 Although there is currently no consensus on how to model this effect, we examined the issue by using an approach37 that involved deriving a heat–mortality response function for use in future mortality projections from 2 present-day cities that had temperatures similar to those projected for the city of interest in the future. The acclimatized assumptions for the 2050s yielded mortality increases about 25% smaller relative to the nonacclimatized results for each scenario, similar to the 20% to 25% acclimatization effects from another recent US study.19 However, the potential impacts of acclimatization remain highly uncertain and are likely to vary substantially in different regions and for different population subgroups. We assumed that population remained constant at 1990s levels in our projections of future health impacts. Any increase in total population density or in the proportion of vulnerable subpopulations would tend to increase the absolute number of heat-related deaths projected for the future. With the aging of the baby boomers (those born in the decade after World War II, 1945–1955), the proportion of the US population aged 65 years and older is expected to increase until 2020.40 People aged 65 years and older have been found in many different settings to be among those most vulnerable to heat stress.1,13,15,41,42 Thus, it can be argued that the population-constant method provides a conservative projection of possible future climate-related changes in temperature-related mortality. Because of computational resource constraints, only summer months were simulated by GISS–MM5 in the main mortality risk assessment and possible early season (i.e., April–May) mortality impacts from extreme heat were not included. It has been suggested that early season heat can have a greater effect on acute mortality43 than in midsummer, and additional GISS–MM5 simulations of daily meteorology in the spring months would be an area for fruitful future research. Further, the current study did not specifically account for possible enhanced mortality because of longer-duration heat events. Several previous studies have found that the longer a heat wave lasts, the bigger its effect on local mortality,44–46 which suggests that the mortality projections here may represent conservative estimates of potential impacts. The linked global-to-regional model system and subsequent mortality analysis synthesize climate models, epidemiology, and risk assessment to advance current understanding of what the range of public health impacts could be among residents of a major metropolitan population subjected to 21st century climate. Regional regulatory schemes for greenhouse gas emission control are beginning to take shape, including the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative47 among 10 northeastern US states. In the future, integrated climate-health modeling systems could help reveal the geography of local vulnerabilities to climate change, which have been associated with poverty, social isolation, and lack of access to medical care. Health impact assessment tools such as those described here may eventually help local planners develop climate impact adaptations that are more efficient and inform the greenhouse gas regulatory process now emerging in the United States and elsewhere.
The research described in this article has been funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science to Achieve Results (STAR; grant R-82873301). Note. The findings presented here do not necessarily reflect the views of EPA and no official endorsement should be inferred.
Human Participant Protection
Peer Reviewed
Contributors Accepted for publication April 16, 2007.
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