Mobility shapes heat exposure inequalities in cities

TL;DR

This study investigates how daily mobility patterns influence heat exposure inequalities among different sociodemographic groups in Spanish cities, revealing that routine movements significantly amplify heat risks for low-income populations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a network-based framework combining mobility data and urban heat maps to quantify and analyze heat exposure disparities across sociodemographic groups.

Findings

Low-income groups experience higher heat exposure than high-income groups.

Routine mobility during commuting increases heat exposure inequalities.

The radiation model better captures observed disparities than the gravity model.

Abstract

Segregation has long been recognized as a driver of environmental inequalities, with disadvantaged groups often living in neighborhoods where heat-related risks are highest. Yet, it remains unclear how daily mobility patterns, embedded within heterogeneous urban heat fields, shape heat exposure inequalities across sociodemographic groups. Using a mobile phone dataset of daily mobility flows and urban temperature fields across 23 Spanish cities, we develop a network-based framework to quantify how different sociodemographic groups experience heat through their daily movements. We find systematic income-related inequalities, with low-income groups consistently experiencing higher exposure than high-income groups, while age-related disparities are smaller in magnitude, with younger individuals slightly more exposed than elderly ones. These inequalities intensify during commuting trips, indicating that routine mobility amplifies spatial heat gradients more than non-routine movements. We further assess whether state-of-the-art population-based mobility models can capture these observed inequalities. The gravity model underestimates income- and age-related exposure differences, whereas the parameter-free radiation model captures most of the observed disparities. This indicates that heat exposure inequalities largely emerge from the interplay between the unequal organization of daily activities across sociodemographic groups and urban heat gradients, rather than from group-specific behavioral differences. Our findings provide a generalizable framework to characterize mobility-driven heat exposure inequalities and inform climate-resilient urban planning and public health strategies as cities face intensifying climate-related risks.