Our study considered these complicated aspects of urban warming to provide necessary guidance for urban design aimed at environmental justice in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, new migrants to cities, especially cities in North China, usually live in affordable housing units without air conditioning (AC) systems, leading to further adverse impacts. This issue requires special attention, as many new immigrants from the countryside to urban areas are likely to be employed in these labor-intensive but climate-sensitive sectors. Moreover, as urban heat stress is more relevant to sectors involving more outdoor work and lower pay, such as construction and manufacturing, than to other sectors, the distribution of the economic damage due to future urban warming raises environmental justice concerns. The aim of our paper was to address these gaps. Furthermore, the urban economy is highly complex and involves numerous sectors. However, these effects and the consequential environmental damage to individual cities have rarely been addressed because the local climate conditions at the city level are more complex and influenced by more factors than the climate conditions on a large scale. Under continuous urbanization, rural residents are increasingly migrating to cities, and the urban economy may be increasingly affected. Due to their varied total populations, age patterns, and economic structures, the adaptive capacities of cities to climate change differ and have not been fully considered in current studies.
While providing critical estimates of the relationship between climate change and labor loss, these studies fall short in evaluating the degree to which actual labor is affected at the regional scale, especially in different cities. Most studies aimed at estimating the labor loss due to future warming adopt a large-scale perspective, focused on the global 17 or country scale 18. Moreover, studies have determined that the economic cost arising from the above labor loss is higher than any other related impact of climate change 15, 16. Several studies have indicated that increased heat stress in the workplace due to climate change can significantly impact occupational safety 11, 12, 13, 14. Under extremely high temperatures and high humidity levels, heat stress can occur as a result of an insufficient ability of the human body to dissipate heat, leading to heat exhaustion, heat stroke 10, and aggregate effects that could reduce labor productivity 8, 9. The extreme apparent temperature, a heat stress index incorporating humidity and temperature, rises much faster than does the air temperature over land 9. Therefore, choosing cities in China as examples could reveal the considerable impact of continued urbanization on urban warming in the future.Īnother important but overlooked aspect of climate change is the global-scale increase in absolute humidity 8. Adaptation to urban warming is becoming increasingly important, as cities are and will continue to be the primary residential areas and workplaces this is especially true in China, where more than 19.74% of the world’s urban population currently lives, and more than 70% of the projected population increase will occur in urban areas 7. Moreover, global population increases are projected in urban areas, which will increase urban heat risk 2 and expose more people to projected warming 6. Increased temperatures have been demonstrated to generate increasingly severe limitations on human activity and health, especially in urban areas 4, 5. Future increases in temperature over the next few decades in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases have been projected at the regional 1, 2 and global 3 scales.
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