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      The Construction and Validation of the Heat Vulnerability Index, a Review

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          Abstract

          The occurrence of extreme heat and its adverse effects will be exacerbated with the trend of global warming. An increasing number of researchers have been working on aggregating multiple heat-related indicators to create composite indices for heat vulnerability assessments and have visualized the vulnerability through geographic information systems to provide references for reducing the adverse effects of extreme heat more effectively. This review includes 15 studies concerning heat vulnerability assessment. We have studied the indicators utilized and the methods adopted in these studies for the construction of the heat vulnerability index (HVI) and then further reviewed some of the studies that validated the HVI. We concluded that the HVI is useful for targeting the intervention of heat risk, and that heat-related health outcomes could be used to validate and optimize the HVI. In the future, more studies should be conducted to provide references for the selection of heat-related indicators and the determination of weight values of these indicators in the development of the HVI. Studies concerning the application of the HVI are also needed.

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          Most cited references61

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          Impact of regional climate change on human health.

          The World Health Organisation estimates that the warming and precipitation trends due to anthropogenic climate change of the past 30 years already claim over 150,000 lives annually. Many prevalent human diseases are linked to climate fluctuations, from cardiovascular mortality and respiratory illnesses due to heatwaves, to altered transmission of infectious diseases and malnutrition from crop failures. Uncertainty remains in attributing the expansion or resurgence of diseases to climate change, owing to lack of long-term, high-quality data sets as well as the large influence of socio-economic factors and changes in immunity and drug resistance. Here we review the growing evidence that climate-health relationships pose increasing health risks under future projections of climate change and that the warming trend over recent decades has already contributed to increased morbidity and mortality in many regions of the world. Potentially vulnerable regions include the temperate latitudes, which are projected to warm disproportionately, the regions around the Pacific and Indian oceans that are currently subjected to large rainfall variability due to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation sub-Saharan Africa and sprawling cities where the urban heat island effect could intensify extreme climatic events.
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            Two decades of urban climate research: a review of turbulence, exchanges of energy and water, and the urban heat island

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              Heat stress and public health: a critical review.

              Heat is an environmental and occupational hazard. The prevention of deaths in the community caused by extreme high temperatures (heat waves) is now an issue of public health concern. The risk of heat-related mortality increases with natural aging, but persons with particular social and/or physical vulnerability are also at risk. Important differences in vulnerability exist between populations, depending on climate, culture, infrastructure (housing), and other factors. Public health measures include health promotion and heat wave warning systems, but the effectiveness of acute measures in response to heat waves has not yet been formally evaluated. Climate change will increase the frequency and the intensity of heat waves, and a range of measures, including improvements to housing, management of chronic diseases, and institutional care of the elderly and the vulnerable, will need to be developed to reduce health impacts.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                Int J Environ Res Public Health
                Int J Environ Res Public Health
                ijerph
                International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
                MDPI
                1661-7827
                1660-4601
                26 June 2015
                July 2015
                : 12
                : 7
                : 7220-7234
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Public Health, Wuhan University, 115 Donghu Road, Wuhan 430071, China; E-Mail: junzhe_bao@ 123456126.com
                [2 ]Office of Epidemiology, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 155 Changbai Road, Changping District, Beijing 102206, China
                [3 ]Global Health Institute, Wuhan University, 115 Donghu Road, Wuhan 430071, China
                Author notes
                [* ]Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mails: lixd@ 123456chinacdc.cn (X.L.); yuchua@ 123456163.com (C.Y.); Tel./Fax: +86-10-5890-0522 (X.L.); +86-27-6875-9299 (C.Y.).
                Article
                ijerph-12-07220
                10.3390/ijerph120707220
                4515652
                26132476
                b97d31fb-cfe4-4ec8-b795-4868c0b25f14
                © 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

                This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 22 April 2015
                : 16 June 2015
                Categories
                Review

                Public health
                extreme heat,heat vulnerability index,vulnerability map,validation of hvi
                Public health
                extreme heat, heat vulnerability index, vulnerability map, validation of hvi

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