Abstract
High ambient summertime temperatures are an increasing health concern
with climate change (1). This is a particular concern for minoritized
households in the United States, for which differential energy burden
may compromise their adaptive capacity to high temperatures (2-14).
Using a fine-scaled spatiotemporal air temperature model and U.S. census
data, we examined local (within-county) differences in warm season
cooling degree days (CDDs) by ethnoracial group as a proxy for local
energy demand across states of the northeast and mid-Atlantic U.S. in
2003–2019. Using state-specific regression models with fixed effects
for year and county, we found that Black and Latino people consistently
experienced more CDDs, non-Hispanic white people experienced cooler
summers, and Asian populations showed mixed results. We also explored a
concentration-based measure of residential segregation for each
ethnoracial group as one possible pathway towards temperature
disparities. The measure was constructed using a Gaussian kernel density
smoothing procedure of population-weighted census tract centroids per
county. We included the segregation measure as a smooth term in a
generalized additive model adjusted for county and year as well as a
tensor smooth for census tract centroids. The results were nonlinear,
but higher concentrations of white people were associated with lower
annual CDDs and higher concentrations of Latino people were associated
with higher annual CDDs than the county average. Concentrations for
Black and Asian people were nonmonotonic, sometimes with bowed
associations. These findings suggest that present-day residential
segregation, as measured by ethnoracial subgroup concentrations, may
contribute to summertime air temperature disparities and influence
adaptive capacity.