Quantifying Vulnerability to Extreme Heat in Time Series Analyses: A Novel Approach Applied to Neighborhood Social Disparities under Climate Change

OBJECTIVES We propose a novel approach to examine vulnerability in the relationship between heat and years of life lost and apply to neighborhood social disparities in Montreal and Paris. METHODS We used historical data from the summers of 1990 through 2007 for Montreal and from 2004 through 2009 for Paris to estimate daily years of life lost social disparities (DYLLD), summarizing social inequalities across groups. We used Generalized Linear Models to separately estimate relative risks (RR) for DYLLD in association with daily mean temperatures in both cities. We used 30 climate scenarios of daily mean temperature to estimate future temperature distributions (2021-2050). We performed random effect meta-analyses to assess the impact of climate change by climate scenario for each city and compared the impact of climate change for the two cities using a meta-regression analysis. RESULTS We show that an increase in ambient temperature leads to an increase in social disparities in daily years of life lost. The impact of climate change on DYLLD attributable to temperature was of 2.06 (95% CI: 1.90, 2.25) in Montreal and 1.77 (95% CI: 1.61, 1.94) in Paris. The city explained a difference of 0.31 (95% CI: 0.14, 0.49) on the impact of climate change. CONCLUSION We propose a new analytical approach for estimating vulnerability in the relationship between heat and health. Our results suggest that in Paris and Montreal, health disparities related to heat impacts exist today and will increase in the future.