Extreme heat is changing habits of daily life

New research quantifies how much very hot temperatures restrict outdoor activity in China. Extreme temperatures make people less likely to pursue outdoor activities they would otherwise make part of their daily routine, a new study led by MIT researchers has confirmed. The data-rich study, set in China, shows that when hourly temperatures reach 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), people are 5 percent less likely to go to public parks, and when hourly temperatures hit 35 C (95 F), people are 13 percent less likely to go to those parks. "We did observe adaptation," says Siqi Zheng, an MIT and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's findings. She adds: "Environmental hazards hurt the daily quality of life. Yes, people protect themselves [by limiting activity], but they lose the benefit of going out to enjoy themselves in nature, or meeting friends in parks." The research adds to our knowledge about the effects of a warming climate by quantifying the effects of hot temperatures on the activity of people within a given day - how they shift their activities from hotter to cooler time periods - and not just across longer periods of time. "We found that if we take into account this within-day adaptation, extreme temperatures actually have a much larger effect on human activity than the previous daily or monthly estimations [indicate]," says Yichun Fan, an MIT doctoral candidate and another of the paper's co-authors.