A sweeping new study covering more than 3 billion people across 28 countries finds that vulnerability to extreme heat goes far beyond air conditioning access or national wealth — and the results challenge conventional thinking about climate adaptation.
When researchers talk about who suffers most from extreme heat, the conversation usually gravitates toward income levels and air conditioning access. A new study from the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), published in Nature Sustainability, upends that framing entirely, finding that education standards, working conditions and infrastructure gaps are actually the dominant forces pushing billions of people into what scientists call “systemic cooling poverty.”
What Is Systemic Cooling Poverty?
The term, coined by co-author Antonella Mazzone, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol and CMCC collaborator, describes situations in which people are “prevented from attaining thermal safety as a result of intersecting forms of systemic deprivation.” In other words, it is not simply a question of whether someone owns a fan or can pay an electricity bill — it is about how climate exposure, housing quality, social inequalities, public health systems and workplace protections all converge to put a person at risk when temperatures rise.
“Systemic Cooling Poverty is a concept and navigation tool that helps organize the combination of conditions that lead individuals, organizations, or communities to encounter health risks, due not only to climate change and extreme heat, but also to a range of other infrastructural factors,” Mazzone said in a news release.
The paper, titled “A multidimensional assessment of Systemic Cooling Poverty in the Global South,” is the first large-scale attempt to measure this vulnerability across five dimensions: climate exposure, infrastructure and assets, social and thermal inequalities, health, and education and working standards.
The Numbers Are Staggering
Spanning 28 countries in the Global South with a combined population of more than 3 billion, the study found that over two-thirds of those people are thermally unsafe in at least one dimension. Nearly 600 million live with severe systemic cooling poverty, meaning they face deprivations across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Perhaps most striking is what the data revealed about the leading driver of vulnerability: education and working standards affect roughly 2.2 billion people — far outpacing climate exposure, infrastructure deficits and health-related factors as a source of risk. This points to how labor regulations, outdoor work requirements, and access to schooling with climate-controlled environments shape who survives a heat event and who does not.
Lead author Giacomo Falchetta, a CMCC researcher, underscored just how many variables feed into the problem.
“This shows that there are many factors that influence Systemic Cooling Poverty: transport, building materials, laws and regulations around work and exposure to heat, as well as access to services,” Falchetta said in the news release. “For example, a city in which everyone has air conditioning is not necessarily one in which there is no Systemic Cooling Poverty.”
GDP Is a Poor Proxy for Heat Vulnerability
The research also debunks the assumption that wealthier nations are necessarily safer. The study found only a weak relationship between national GDP per capita and systemic cooling poverty scores. Countries like Indonesia, Egypt and Jordan — despite being structurally hot climates — record comparatively low vulnerability scores because they have stronger infrastructure, better service access, and more developed policy frameworks around heat risk.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where average temperatures are actually less extreme, rank among the most vulnerable nations due to deep infrastructure gaps, entrenched social inequalities, and inadequate health and labor protections. The takeaway: a country’s heat problem is as much a governance and development challenge as it is a meteorological one.
The study also highlights sharp disparities within countries, with specific subnational regions suffering far worse outcomes than their national averages might suggest. This granularity, the researchers argue, is critical for directing adaptation investments to the communities that need them most.
Why It Matters for Students and Young People
For college students — especially those studying public health, urban planning, environmental science, international development or policy — this research offers a sobering blueprint for what climate adaptation must actually address. The question of “how we adapt to rising temperatures” is no longer just about building more cooling centers or subsidizing energy bills.
Extreme heat events are intensifying globally, from record-breaking European heatwaves to lethal hot spells across South Asia and the Middle East. The study warns that billions of people are already approaching or crossing physiological safety thresholds in places where housing stock, workplace standards and public institutions are wholly unprepared to protect them.
For students pursuing careers in climate policy, social work or global health, the systemic cooling poverty framework offers a new lens: one that treats heat vulnerability as a product of intersecting deprivations rather than a single fixable problem. That distinction could define the difference between effective policy and well-intentioned but ultimately inadequate interventions.
Source: CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change