【思源论坛第167讲】俞秀梅博士：极端气温与死亡率

This paper examines the effects of extreme temperatures on mortality rates using random year-to-year variation in temperature based on a county-level panel in China. We find a robust U-shaped relationship between temperature and mortality rates, indicating that extreme cold or hot temperatures will lead to excess deaths. The heat-related (cold-related) effect is 3.5 times (2.3 times) as large as previous findings that use U.S. data, and is especially large for the elderly population, mainly due to excess deaths caused by cardiovascular diseases. Applying these results to HadGEM2-ES climate-change prediction shows that by the year of 2061-2080 the annual mortality rate is likely to increase by 12.1%, the estimated health cost of which is around 0.84 trillion Chinese Yuan per year. The paper also explores households’ adaptation behaviors to extreme temperatures. We find that although urban households increase energy consumption when exposed to cold temperatures and purchase more air conditioners on both hot and cold days, rural households are unresponsive to temperature fluctuations, implying that rural people may be more resource constrained and suffer more when extreme temperatures occur.