TY - JOUR
T1 - Climatic conditions and human mortality
T2 - spatial and regional variation in the United States
AU - Yang, Tse Chuan
AU - Jensen, Leif
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge the support from the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany, SUNY [R24-HD044943] and from the Population Research Institute at Penn State [R24-HD041025]. Both receive core funding from The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Leif Jensen was supported by a USDA-funded Hatch Multistate Project W-3001, “The Great Recession, Its Aftermath, and Patterns of Rural and Small Town Demographic Change,” administered through Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Experiment Station Project Number PEN04504. We thank Karen Fisher-Vanden and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Remaining errors in logic or analysis are ours alone.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.
PY - 2017/3/1
Y1 - 2017/3/1
N2 - Previous research on climatic conditions and human mortality in the United States has three gaps: largely ignoring social conditions, lack of nationwide focus, and overlooking potential spatial variations. Our goal is to understand whether climatic conditions contribute to mortality after considering social conditions and to investigate whether spatial non-stationarity exists in these factors. Applying geographically weighted regression to a unique nationwide county-level dataset, we found that (1) net of other factors, average July temperatures are positively (detrimentally) associated with mortality, while January temperatures mainly have a curvilinear relationship, (2) the mortality-climatic condition associations are spatially non-stationary, (3) the relationships between social conditions (e.g., social capital) and mortality are stable geographically, and (4) without a spatial approach to understanding the environment-mortality relationship, important spatial variations are overlooked. Our findings suggest that a universal approach to coping with the relationships between rapid climate changes and health may not be appropriate nor effective.
AB - Previous research on climatic conditions and human mortality in the United States has three gaps: largely ignoring social conditions, lack of nationwide focus, and overlooking potential spatial variations. Our goal is to understand whether climatic conditions contribute to mortality after considering social conditions and to investigate whether spatial non-stationarity exists in these factors. Applying geographically weighted regression to a unique nationwide county-level dataset, we found that (1) net of other factors, average July temperatures are positively (detrimentally) associated with mortality, while January temperatures mainly have a curvilinear relationship, (2) the mortality-climatic condition associations are spatially non-stationary, (3) the relationships between social conditions (e.g., social capital) and mortality are stable geographically, and (4) without a spatial approach to understanding the environment-mortality relationship, important spatial variations are overlooked. Our findings suggest that a universal approach to coping with the relationships between rapid climate changes and health may not be appropriate nor effective.
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U2 - 10.1007/s11111-016-0262-y
DO - 10.1007/s11111-016-0262-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 28373741
AN - SCOPUS:84988322462
SN - 0199-0039
VL - 38
SP - 261
EP - 285
JO - Population and Environment
JF - Population and Environment
IS - 3
ER -
