Heat Waves are Racist

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Racism is magnifying the deadly impact of rising city heat

Scientists are mapping correlations between race, poverty and heat in cities, and suggesting solutions to reduce the dangers.

Inequality and extreme heat
In many US cities, temperatures tend to be substantially higher in areas that have borne the brunt of discriminatory housing policies and practices. The Climate Safe Neighborhoods partnership has mapped the impacts of these policies in Cincinnati, Ohio, and 8 other cities.

Starting in the 1930s, the US government rated neighbourhoods in many cities on the perceived risk level for home loans. Grades were based on several factors, including the races of people living there. The riskiest or lowest grade was marked in red, which gave rise to the term redlining.

Areas of the city that were most affected by discriminatory housing practices have much less tree cover.

An analysis of data from the Landsat 8 satellite for the summers of 2013–19 shows that some areas have temperatures that are many degrees higher than the average for the mapped zone.

Temperature patrols

Shandas remembers when he first got his driver’s licence and would eagerly cruise around his home town to see as much as possible. He was struck by how temperature displays outside banks differed across the city. That didn’t mean the banks had malfunctioning thermometers, Shandas says; each bank displayed the temperature in its particular environment, whether that was a hot reflective parking lot or a cool, shaded street.

Later, when he began working in climate science, Shandas recruited people to travel around various cities with temperature sensors mounted to their cars or bikes. He was surprised by how detailed and revealing the measurements from different blocks were. “We had a hunch there would be a difference,” he says. “But we didn’t know it would translate so explicitly and so systematically to air temperatures.”

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