Wealthier neighborhoods in cities across the Global South are hotter than the poor areas surrounding them.
This pattern is the exact opposite of what scientists observe in American cities like New York or Los Angeles. In the U.S., poverty is almost always linked to heat islands with fewer trees and more pavement. Cultural and historical factors in the Global South lead the rich to build in ways that trap more heat than low-income settlements. Assuming that heat is a burden of the poor leads to ineffective urban planning in most of the world. Solving the climate crisis requires looking beyond the data from Western nations.
Higher urban heat hazard in wealthier neighborhoods in the Global South
research_square · rs-4461139
Abstract Urbanization leads to local warming in addition to background climate change, which disproportionately impacts society due to the high population densities of cities. Scientific and media discourse around urban heat is often framed around intra-urban differences in hazard and exposure due to the spatial heterogeneity of cities and segregation of urban sub-populations. Since almost all multi-city assessments of income-based heat disparities are from the U.S., it is important to examine w