CPH Tech Policy Brief #3

Monitoring the Behavioral and Social Impacts of a Warming Climate

What are the hidden human costs of climate change? 

Kelton Minor has summarized key insights from two of his recent research studies examining the hidden human costs of climate change and behavioral impacts of a warming climate on a global scale.

This third edition of the CPH Tech Policy Brief investigates the hidden human costs of climate change, including:

• How rising temperatures caused by human accelerated climate change affect human sleep.
• How weather extremes affect expressions of human sentiments online.

The key findings presented in this brief are that extreme weather worsens online sentiment both in terms of a larger share of online posts with negative sentiments and a reduction of posts with positive sentiments. Furthermore, it shows that rising night-time temperatures harm human sleep and that this hidden impact of heat is not distributed equally: the elderly, residents of lower-income countries, females, those already living in hotter climates, and future generations are disproportionately impacted. This carries implications for how to design policies to mitigate the uneven distribution of climate change-related loss and damage to human well-being, sleep, and behavior.

To measure the effect of extreme heat events on online expressed human sentiments, these findings draw on ~8 billion geolocated social media posts from 190 countries. Furthermore, this study examines over 10 billion minute-level sleep measurements from 68 countries to measure the effect of rising night-time temperatures on sleep.