The Spatial Distribution of the Burden of Heat-Related Mortality by Causes of Death in Madrid

Diego Ramiro Fariñas, IEGD-CCHS Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Dariya Ordanovich, Spanish National Research Council
Aurelio Tobias, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, Spanish Council for Scientific Research
Stanislao Mazzoni, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

The association between ambient temperatures and health outcomes was extensively studied in the past decades, especially in the light of exacerbating climate change. Minimum Mortality, or so-called Optimum temperatures are increasingly used to assess the levels of adaptation to changing temperatures. The warming of the air temperatures in Spain affected the entire national territory since the turn of the XX century. However, the number of studies exploring the evolution of adaptation to heat and relying on multidecadal time-series data in Spain at any administrative level is very limited. We will explore in this contribution the spatial distribution o cause of death mortality within an Urban capital We examined the patterns of adaptation to extreme heat in the city of Madrid in the period from 1890 until 1930 using daily data on air temperature received from the meteorological stations and all-cause mortality from yearly books and civil registers. Using a distributed-lag nonlinear modelling approach we explored the complex heat-mortality relations and estimated the changes in the adaptation metrics by decade using cause of death and the historical spatial data infrastructure of Madrid. Based on the previous research by the authors performed at different spatial levels in Spain for shorter time periods, we expect to see a gradual increase in the optimum temperatures over time, along with the overall increment of the air temperatures, especially in the last decades. We also expect to see a general reduction in the heat-attributable mortality fractions, which would indicate a progressive adaptation to overall warming of air temperatures and intensification of weather extremes. We expect a spatially different response of mortality to intense heat within the city due to different housing environment and development of urban infrastructures in each area of the city and we include in this analysis the distribution by cause of death.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 32. Presidential Session: Environmental Justice and Public Health