Interventions

Interventions for Extreme Heat

We synthesize existing research on the effectiveness of various interventions and strategies that have the potential to reduce existing health burdens of moderate and extreme temperatures. Our primary focus is on studies that can make plausibly causal claims about the effect of an intervention or policy on the temperature-mortality relationship---that is, studies with a research design that can determine whether it was the intervention in question, rather than something else correlated with the intervention, that affected temperature-related health outcomes. A secondary focus is on studies that are able to make credible causal statements about interventions that result in favorable changes to an individuals' exposure to suboptimal temperatures, even if these changes are not observably linked to health outcomes in the same study. We view such changes as useful but not sufficient for understanding health impacts. Our focus is not on whether a technology or approach can function in principle (e.g., can AC cool a room) but whether programs or interventions that expand access to that technology reduce exposures or impacts (e.g., does a program that subsidizes AC units reduce indoor temperatures and health impacts). Regarding intervention efficacy, we judge evidence to be “strong" if there is repeated causal evidence from real-world applications of a given approach. We emphasize that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; many proposed and enacted interventions remain very under-evaluated. See About page for additional methodological details.