Extreme Heat, Aging, and Mobility Equity: Neighborhood Adaptation Capacity

• In Event: Extreme Heat, Health, and Urban Adaptation

Abstract

Extreme heat is increasingly recognized as a major urban policy challenge, particularly in rapidly aging societies where climate-related risks may not be evenly distributed across population groups. Although a growing body of research has documented the health consequences of extreme heat, much less is known about how heat shapes everyday mobility and whether these effects vary by age. Mobility is a critical component of daily life because it structures access to social participation, essential services, and routine activities. At the same time, reductions in mobility during extreme heat are not necessarily straightforward to interpret: they may reflect either constrained access to daily activities or protective behavioral adaptation to hazardous conditions. This ambiguity makes it especially important to examine how mobility responses to heat differ across age groups and local contexts. 
This study investigates whether extreme heat is associated with larger reductions in the daily mobility of older adults and whether such age-differentiated mobility responses vary across neighborhoods with different levels of access to heat adaptation resources. Focusing on Seoul, Korea, the analysis combines day-level mobility measures derived from mobile phone data with neighborhood indicators capturing local adaptive capacity. Specifically, it employs a triple-difference framework that compares mobility responses between older and non-older adults on extreme heat days and examines whether age-based mobility gaps are smaller in neighborhoods with greater access to heat adaptation resources. 
The results show that extreme heat is associated with lower mobility overall, with larger declines observed among older adults than among non-older adults. This age-based mobility gap is less pronounced in neighborhoods with better access to heat adaptation resources. These findings suggest that mobility is an important dimension of climate-related inequality in aging cities. More broadly, the results highlight the potential role of neighborhood-scale adaptive resources in supporting more equitable conditions for maintaining daily activities under extreme heat.

Author

• Eun Jin Shin, Sungkyunkwan University
  Presenting Author