Assessing Societal Response to Extreme Temperature Shocks

Climate projections suggest greatly increased exposure to heat, and they have recently been outpaced by record-shattering heat events. Not all physical mechanisms are understood, and many open questions remain on the coordinated and uncoordinated human responses to record-breaking events. Insights into societal reactions to such outlier records are important for designing adaptation strategies, and for anticipating societal dynamics.We hypothesize heat extremes trigger societal response. Therefore, we design a statistical framework to explore heat record exceedance in recent decades and combine it with socioeconomic impact and response data to elucidate event-response relationships. More specifically, we assess air conditioning uptake in Europe and heat-health impacts. As meteorological baseline we use daily maximum temperature and compare it with annual air-conditioning data at country-level, global burden of disease reports, and socio-economic variables. We validate our hypothesis using both fixed effects regression models, and event coincidence analysis. We first find that while temperature records show a strong upward trend in entire Europe, the occurrence of large temperature record exceedance is spatially heterogeneous. Fixed effects analyses show a statistically significant effect of highest temperature and gross-domestic product on air-conditioning uptake. They also highlight the importance of a one-year time lag between highest temperature and the air-conditioning data. Further, event coincidence analysis points at an impact of single heat events on air-conditioning uptake.Overall, our results show promising insights into an issue that is of urgent societal importance in the face of new records. Insights into the driving role of single record-breaking events are very valuable for informing adaptation measures, wider policies, but also early warning systems and approaches related to anticipatory action.