Heat health risk assessment and identification of priority control areas in residential communities of Shijiazhuang

Shikai Song^*Yanrui ShangLeibin WangQiang LiuYuanjie Zhao

• School of Geographical Sciences, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China

Under global warming, urban dwellers have been at significant health risk due to urban heat islands and frequent extreme heat events in recent years. Most previous assessments of heat health risk focused on the regional scale, with few studies conducted based on the residential community, which was a single functional residential area, fundamental geographical, administrative, and disaster emergency management unit. Therefore, in this study, heat health risks of 1086 residential communities in the main urban area of Shijiazhuang City, China, were assessed by the risk framework of the IPCC, in which the risk was multiplicatively aggregated by hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. The results indicated that the hazard followed a center-periphery pattern with decreasing value from the city center to the periphery, whereas vulnerability presented the opposite trend. This pattern aligned with the finding that hazard-dominant risk residential communities were generally distributed close to the center and the vulnerability-dominant risk appeared primarily near the periphery. Five villages some distance from the city center were evaluated to present very high risk, with vulnerability as the dominant risk factor. Two of the five villages were identified as priority control communities, and increasing the percentage of water bodies and vegetation was the most practical way to lower the heat health risk. The results can assist urban managers in gathering comprehensive information about the heat health risk and developing effective mitigation strategies.