Forbes takes an interest in low-income urban heatwaves

Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash report:

How to increase attention to climate inequities

Why this neglect of the underprivileged on the critical issue of climate adaptation? One reason might be that media and policymakers tend to focus on “average” statistics at the city or county level: the average temperature, the average tree cover, etc. But averages provide an incomplete, perhaps misleading, picture in highly inequitable societies.

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To capture the experiences of the vulnerable sections, media and local officials could report (alongside the average temperature) the temperatures for low-income areas.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone who lives in a city with a major divide between the rich and the poor. The difference in temperature is astoundingly obvious when you walk or bike across neighborhoods. My own city is in the top ten list of places with this issue.