Including the urban heat island in spatial heat health risk assessment strategies: a case study for Birmingham, UK

When looking at vulnerable sections of the population, the analysis identifies a concentration of "very high" risk areas within the city centre, and a number of pockets of "high risk" areas scattered throughout the conurbation. Further analysis looks at household level data which yields a complicated picture with a considerable range of vulnerabilities at a neighbourhood scale.The results illustrate that a concentration of "very high" risk people live within the urban heat island, and this should be taken into account by urban planners and city centre environmental managers when considering climate change adaptation strategies or heatwave alert schemes. The methodology has been designed to be transparent and to make use of powerful and readily available datasets so that it can be easily replicated in other urban areas.The aim of this paper is to integrate remotely sensed urban heat island data alongside commercial social segmentation data through a spatial risk assessment methodology in order to highlight potential heat health risk areas. This will build the foundations for a climate change risk assessment using the city of Birmingham, UK as a case study area.There is a growing recognition in the fields of bio-meteorology, epidemiology, climatology and environmental health that heat risk in urban areas is a problem, with literature considering cities in Europe [1], the USA [2,3], Australia [4] and Asia [5,6]. Elevated temperatures cause increased human mortality [7] which is exacerbated in heatwaves resulting in excess deaths. A number of examples are available in the literature such as in the 1995 UK heatwave [8], the 1995 Chicago heatwave [9] or the 2003 European heatwave [10] which affected France [11-14], England [15,16], the Netherlands [17], Portugal [18] and Spain [19]. There is growing evidence that the intensity, frequency and duration of heatwaves is likely to increase in the future [20]. This is prompting increased research into heat health risk projectio