Abstract
Evidence shows that global warming does not affect all geographical areas and social groups equally. In this line, various previous studies analysed inequality and overexposure of socioeconomic groups to land surface temperature (LST) as a proxy for heat exposure. However, the previous studies did not offer insight into whether inequality perpetuates, increases or decreases in the event of a vast increase in LST and whether such association differs from one geographic context to another. This study seeks answers to a core research question: Does higher LST trigger higher inequality in Europe? This study measures the magnitude (population-weighted average) and inequality (population-weighted Gini) of exposure to LST in different areas of Europe. It adapts local and global Moran’s I and the Local Bivariate Relationship analyses. The results show that high magnitudes of LST are clustered in southern Europe and low values in the northern. High values of inequality are less clustered and can be found anywhere across Europe. In the north of Europe, there is a convex (U-shaped) relationship between LST magnitude and inequality, i.e. the highest inequality occurs at the highest and lowest magnitudes. Oppositely, the relationship is concave (⋂-shaped) in the south of Europe. Ultimately, the results are discussed.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The raw data was retrieved from open-access sources. The analyzed data is available on request.
References
Anselin, L. (1995). Local indicators of spatial association—LISA. Geographical Analysis, 27(2), 93–115.
Bereitschaft, B. (2020). Gentrification central: A change-based typology of the American urban core, 2000–2015. Applied Geography, 118, 102206.
Chakraborty, T., Hsu, A., Manya, D., & Sheriff, G. (2019). Disproportionately higher exposure to urban heat in lower-income neighborhoods: a multi-city perspective. Environmental Research Letters, 14(10), 105003.
Climate Adapt (2021). Heat waves. https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/knowledge/tools/urban-adaptation/climatic-threats/heat-waves. Accessed 31/01/2021.
Copernicus (2023a). Record warmth in global surface air and sea surface temperatures. https://climate.copernicus.eu/june-2023-record-warmth-global-surface-air-and-sea-surface-temperatures. Accessed 05/08/2023.
Copernicus (2023b). The European heatwave of July 2023 in a longer-term context. https://climate.copernicus.eu/european-heatwave-july-2023-longer-term-context. Accessed 05/08/2023.
European Environment Agency, (2018). Unequal exposure and unequal impacts: Social vulnerability to air pollution, noise and extreme temperatures in Europe. EEA Report NO 22/2018.
Eurostat, (2021). Administrative Units / Statistical Units, NUTS. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statisticalunits/nuts. Accessed 05/12/2023.
Firozjaei, M. K., Kiavarz, M., & Alavipanah, S. K. (2022). Impact of surface characteristics and their adjacency effects on urban land surface temperature in different seasonal conditions and latitudes. Building and Environment, 219, 109145.
Getis, A. (2010). Spatial autocorrelation. Handbook of applied spatial analysis (pp. 255–278). Springer.
Ghorbani, S., Salehi, E., Faryadi, S., & Jafari, H. R. (2022). Analyzing urban environmental justice based on supply, demand, and access to cooling ecosystem services in Tehran, Iran. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 65(2), 288–310.
Gierlichs, B., Batina, L., Tuyls, P., & Preneel, B. (2008). August. Mutual information analysis. International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (pp. 426–442). Springer.
Guo, D. (2010). Local entropy map: A nonparametric approach to detecting spatially varying multivariate relationships. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 24(9), 1367–1389.
Hoffmann, R., Muttarak, R., Peisker, J., & Stanig, P. (2022). Climate change experiences raise environmental concerns and promote green voting. Nature Climate Change, 12(2), 148–155.
Hsu, A., Sheriff, G., Chakraborty, T., & Manya, D. (2021). Disproportionate exposure to urban heat island intensity across major US cities. Nature Communications, 12(1), 1–11.
Huang, G., & Cadenasso, M. L. (2016). People, landscape, and urban heat island: Dynamics among neighborhood social conditions, land cover and surface temperatures. Landscape Ecology, 31(10), 2507–2515.
Kabisch, N., Strohbach, M., Haase, D., & Kronenberg, J. (2016). Urban green space availability in European cities. Ecological Indicators, 70, 586–596.
Klemm, W., Heusinkveld, B. G., Lenzholzer, S., Jacobs, M. H., & Van Hove, B. (2015). Psychological and physical impact of urban green spaces on outdoor thermal comfort during summertime in the Netherlands. Building and Environment, 83, 120–128.
Lerman, R. I., & Yitzhaki, S. (1989). Improving the accuracy of estimates of Gini coefficients. Journal of Econometrics, 42(1), 43–47.
Li, Y., Sun, Y., Li, J., & Gao, C. (2020). Socioeconomic drivers of urban heat island effect: Empirical evidence from major Chinese cities. Sustainable Cities and Society, 63, 102425.
Mashhoodi, B., (2021a). Environmental justice and surface temperature: Income, ethnic, gender, and age inequalities. Sustainable Cities and Society, 68, p.102810. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.102810.
Mashhoodi, B., (2021b). Feminization of surface temperature: Environmental justice and gender inequality among socioeconomic groups. Urban Climate, 40, p.101004. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.101004
Mehrotra, S., Bardhan, R., & Ramamritham, K. (2018). Urban informal housing and surface urban heat island intensity: Exploring spatial association in the City of Mumbai. Environment and Urbanization ASIA, 9(2), 158–177.
Mitchell, B. C., & Chakraborty, J. (2018). Exploring the relationship between residential segregation and thermal inequity in 20 US cities. Local Environment, 23(8), 796–813.
Molenaar, R. E., Heusinkveld, B. G., & Steeneveld, G. J. (2016). Projection of rural and urban human thermal comfort in the Netherlands for 2050. International Journal of Climatology, 36(4), 1708–1723.
Moos, M., Revington, N., Wilkin, T., & Andrey, J. (2019). The knowledge economy city: Gentrification, studentification and youthification, and their connections to universities. Urban Studies, 56(6), 1075–1092.
Moos, M., Filion, P., Quick, M., & Walter-Joseph, R. (2019a). Youthification across the metropolitan system: Intra-urban residential geographies of young adults in north American metropolitan areas (Vol. 93, pp. 224–237). Cities.
Moran, P. A. P. (1948). The interpretation of statistical maps. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 10(2), 243–251.
Napieralski, J., Sulich, C., Taylor, A., & Draus, P. (2022). Mapping the link between outdoor water footprint and social vulnerability in Metro Phoenix, AZ (USA). Landscape and Urban Planning, 226, 104498.
Offerle, B., Grimmond, C. S. B., Fortuniak, K., Kłysik, K., & Oke, T. R. (2006). Temporal variations in heat fluxes over a central European city centre. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 84(1–3), 103–115.
Oreszczyn, T., Hong, S. H., Ridley, I., Wilkinson, P., Warm Front Study Group. (2006). Determinants of winter indoor temperatures in low income households in England. Energy and Buildings, 38(3), 245–252.
Rérat, P. (2019). The return of cities: The trajectory of Swiss cities from demographic loss to reurbanization. European Planning Studies, 27(2), 355–376.
Reuters (2019). Climate records fall as Europe bakes in heatwaveDutch measure record temperature of 39.4 degrees Celsius – KNMI. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-weather-idUSKCN1UK21H, https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-weather-netherlands-record/dutch-measure-record-temperature-of-394-degrees-celsius-knmi-idUSA5N20800J. Accessed 31/01/2021.
Revington, N., Zwick, A., Hartt, M., & Schlosser, J. (2021). Universities and urban social structure: Gentrification, studentification, and youthification in five United States legacy cities. Urban geography, pp.1–22.
Sabater, A., Graham, E., & Finney, N. (2017). The spatialities of ageing: Evidencing increasing spatial polarisation between older and younger adults in England and Wales. Demographic Research, 36, 731–744.
Saverino, K. C., Routman, E., Lookingbill, T. R., Eanes, A. M., Hoffman, J. S., & Bao, R. (2021). Thermal inequity in Richmond, VA: the effect of an unjust evolution of the urban landscape on urban heat islands. Sustainability, 13(3), 1511.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423.
Vargo, J., Stone, B., Habeeb, D., Liu, P., & Russell, A. (2016). The social and spatial distribution of temperature-related health impacts from urban heat island reduction policies. Environmental Science & Policy, 66, 366–374.
Voelkel, J., Hellman, D., Sakuma, R., & Shandas, V. (2018). Assessing vulnerability to urban heat: A study of disproportionate heat exposure and access to refuge by sociodemographic status in Portland, Oregon. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(4), 640.
Wang, C., Li, Y., Myint, S. W., Zhao, Q., & Wentz, E. A. (2019). Impacts of spatial clustering of urban land cover on land surface temperature across Köppen climate zones in the contiguous United States (Vol. 192, p. 103668). Landscape and Urban Planning.
Wang, X., Dallimer, M., Scott, C. E., Shi, W., & Gao, J. (2021). Tree species richness and diversity predicts the magnitude of urban heat island mitigation effects of greenspaces. Science of The Total Environment, 770, 145211.
Wong, M. S., Peng, F., Zou, B., Shi, W. Z., & Wilson, G. J. (2016). Spatially analyzing the inequity of the Hong Kong urban heat island by socio-demographic characteristics. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(3), 317.
World Weather Attribution (2019). Human contribution to record-breaking June 2019 heatwave in France. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/human-contribution-to-record-breaking-june-2019-heatwave-in-france/. Accessed 31/01/2021.
WorldPop (2018). The spatial distribution of population in 2019. https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/WP00647
WorldPop (2023). WorldPop gridded population estimate datasets and tools. How are they different and which should I use? https://www.worldpop.org/methods/populations/. Accessed07/02/2023
Xu, C., Chen, G., Huang, Q., Su, M., Rong, Q., Yue, W., & Haase, D. (2022). Can improving the spatial equity of urban green space mitigate the effect of urban heat islands? An empirical study. Science of The Total Environment, 841, 156687.
Zasada, I., Loibl, W., Berges, R., Steinnocher, K., Köstl, M., Piorr, A., & Werner, A. (2013). Rural–urban regions: A spatial approach to define urban–rural relationships in Europe. Peri-urban futures: Scenarios and models for land use change in Europe (pp. 45–68). Springer.
Zeng, P., Sun, F., Shi, D., Liu, Y., Zhang, R., Tian, T., & Che, Y. (2022). Integrating anthropogenic heat emissions and cooling accessibility to explore environmental justice in heat-related health risks in Shanghai, China. Landscape and Urban Planning, 226, 104490.
Zhang, T., Zhou, Y., Zhu, Z., Li, X., & Asrar, G. R. (2022). A global seamless 1 km resolution daily land surface temperature dataset (2003–2020). Earth System Science Data, 14(2), 651–664.
Zhou, W., Huang, G., Pickett, S. T., Wang, J., Cadenasso, M. L., McPhearson, T., Grove, J. M., & Wang, J. (2021). Urban tree canopy has greater cooling effects in socially vulnerable communities in the US. One Earth, 4(12), 1764–1775.
Zhou, Y., Zhao, H., Mao, S., Zhang, G., Jin, Y., Luo, Y., Huo, W., Pan, Z., An, P., & Lun, F. (2022). Exploring surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity and its implications based on urban 3D neighborhood metrics: An investigation of 57 Chinese cities. Science of The Total Environment, 847, 157662.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Mashhoodi, B. Temperature Rise Amplifies Environmental Inequities? Europe’s North-South Divide. Appl. Spatial Analysis (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-023-09555-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-023-09555-6