Are Energy-Poor Communities in California More Vulnerable to Heat Wave-Related Health Burdens?

As energy plays a vital role in mitigating health risks from heat waves, we can expect energy-poor communities to struggle with heat-related health burdens. We investigate how energy burden and health burdens of heat waves are related in a bi-variate Spearman correlation analysis on census-level data from California. We find that the annual population loss rate of heat events is medium correlated with the average energy burden of a census tract (Spearman coefficient: 0.41), while the correlation with the frequency of heat events is higher (0.5). This indicates that energy burden is a relevant factor in a community’s vulnerability to heat waves, but that there are also other factors at play. Further research is needed to determine if policies aimed at energy-poor communities could offer the co-benefit of mitigating heat-related illness as well.