More Heat Exposure and Fewer Cooling Options for People of Color in Connecticut
A study from Yale School of the Environment researchers demonstrates that communities of color in Connecticut cities face rising heat with fewer cooling resources, highlighting urgent environmental justice concerns.
Researchers at the Yale School of the Environment conducted a study, published in Urban Sustainability, examining how urban heat exposure and cooling strategies have changed in the past thirty years in Connecticut’s ten largest cities. Using data from U.S. census records, satellite imagery, OpenStreetMap, and property assessments, the team studied how rising urban temperatures are distributed differently across communities.
Their analysis found that lower-income communities of color experienced consistently higher average temperatures, more days of extreme heat, and more significant increases in heat exposure over a thirty-year period. They also found that these neighborhoods have less adaptation infrastructure, such as fewer shade trees and significantly lower air-conditioning ownership rates than in predominantly white neighborhoods. This results in a double burden of higher heat and fewer resources to mitigate it, leaving residents in these communities especially vulnerable to heat-related health and economic risks.
This study is the first to investigate inequalities in heat exposure and adaptation over time in Connecticut cities, and provides new geospatial datasets that can be used to identify heat-vulnerable communities. It highlights that increasing urban heat disproportionately affects people of color in Connecticut, and the importance of increasing tree canopy cover in communities of color to mitigate heat, especially in communities with low air conditioning access.
Link to article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-024-00186-5
Fact sheet on equitable urban forestry: https://hixon.yale.edu/resource/equitable-urban-forestry
