Abstract
Air conditioning adoption is increasing dramatically worldwide as incomes rise and average temperatures go up. Using daily temperature data from 14,500 weather stations, we rank 219 countries and 1,692 cities based on a widely used measure of cooling demand called total cooling degree day exposure. India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh and the Philippines all have more total cooling degree day exposure than the United States—a country that uses 400 terawatt-hours of electricity annually for air conditioning.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
This research relies entirely on publicly available data. Detailed information on all sources is available in the Supplementary Information, and additional results and other materials are available in the Supplementary Data. Source data for Fig. 1 are provided with the paper.
Code availability
All code and related materials used in the analysis are available as Supplementary Software.
References
Gertler, P., Shelef, O., Wolfram, C. & Fuchs, A. The demand for energy-using assets among the world’s rising middle classes. Am. Econ. Rev. 106, 1366–1401 (2016).
Wolfram, C., Shelef, O. & Gertler, P. How will energy demand develop in the developing world? J. Econ. Perspect. 26, 119–137 (2012).
Auffhammer, M. & Wolfram, C. Powering up China: income distributions and residential electricity consumption. Am. Econ. Rev. 104, 575–580 (2014).
Davis, L. & Gertler, P. Contribution of air conditioning adoption to future energy use under global warming. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 5962–5967 (2015).
Park, J. R., Goodman, J., Hurwitz, M. & Smith, J. Heat and learning. Am. Econ. J. Econ. Policy. (in the press).
Burgess, R., Deschenes, O., Donaldson, D. & Greenstone, M. Weather, Climate Change and Death in India. Working Paper (2017).
Carleton, T. et al. Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits. Working Paper (Univ. Chicago, 2018).
Barreca, A., Clay, K., Deschênes, O., Greenstone, M. & Shapiro, J. S. Adapting to climate change: the remarkable decline in the U.S. temperature–mortality relationship over the twentieth century. J. Polit. Econ. 124, 105–159 (2016).
Waite, M. et al. Global trends in urban electricity demands for cooling and heating. Energy 127, 786–802 (2017).
Wenz, L., Levermann, A. & Auffhammer, M. North–South polarization of European electricity consumption under future warming. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, E7910–E7918 (2017).
Auffhammer, M., Baylis, P. & Hausman, C. Climate change is projected to have severe impacts on the frequency and intensity of peak electricity demand across the United States. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, 1886–1891 (2017).
Slade, M. The Future of Cooling: Opportunities for Energy-Efficient Air Conditioning (OECD/IEA, 2018).
Shah, N. et al. Opportunities for Simultaneous Efficiency Improvement and Refrigerant Transition in Air Conditioning. Working Paper (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2017).
Sivak, M. Potential energy demand for cooling in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the world: implications for developing countries. Energy Policy 37, 1382–1384 (2009).
Sivak, M. Will air conditioning put a chill on the global energy supply? Am. Sci. 101, 330–333 (2013).
Petri, Y. & Caldeira, K. Impacts of global warming on residential heating and cooling degree-days in the United States. Sci. Rep. 5, 12427 (2015).
Atalla, T., Gualdi, S. & Lanza, A. A global degree days database for energy-related applications. Energy 143, 1048–1055 (2018).
Isaac, M. & Van Vuuren, D. P. Modeling global residential sector energy demand for heating and air conditioning in the context of climate change. Energy Policy 37, 507–521 (2009).
McNeil, M. A. & Letschert, V. E. Modeling diffusion of electrical appliances in the residential sector. Energy Buildings 42, 783–790 (2010).
Baumert, K. & Selman, M. Data note: heating and cooling degree days. World Resources Institute (2003).
Auffhammer, M. & Aroonruengsawat, A. Simulating the impacts of climate change, prices and population on California’s residential electricity consumption. Clim. Change 109, 191–210 (2011).
Deschênes, O. & Greenstone, M. Climate change, mortality, and adaptation: evidence from annual fluctuations in weather in the U.S. Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 3, 152–185 (2011).
Biddle, J. Explaining the spread of residential air conditioning, 1955–1980. Explor. Econ. Hist. 45, 402–423 (2008).
Akpinar-Ferrand, E. & Singh, A. Modeling increased demand of energy for air conditioners and consequent CO2 emissions to minimize health risks due to climate change in India. Environ. Sci. Policy 13, 702–712 (2010).
Gupta, E. Global warming and electricity demand in the rapidly growing city of Delhi: a semi-parametric variable coefficient approach. Energy Econ. 34, 1407–1421 (2012).
Abhyankar, N., Shah, N., Park, W. Y. & Phadke, A. Accelerating Energy Efficiency Improvements in Room Air Conditioners in India: Potential, Costs–Benefits, and Policies. Working Paper LBNL-1005798 (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2017).
World Energy Outlook 2018 (OECD/IEA, 2018).
Newell, R. G., Jaffe, A. B. & Stavins, R. N. The induced innovation hypothesis and energy-saving technological change. Q. J. Econ. 114, 941–975 (1999).
Acemoglu, D. & Linn, J. Market size in innovation: theory and evidence from the pharmaceutical industry. Q. J. Econ. 119, 1049–1090 (2004).
Georgescu, M., Morefield, P. E., Bierwagen, B. G. & Weaver, C. P. Urban adaptation can roll back warming of emerging megapolitan regions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 2909–2914 (2014).
Barreca, A. Climate change, humidity, and mortality in the United States. J. Environ. Econ. Manage. 63, 19–34 (2012).
Acknowledgements
The authors have not received any financial compensation for this project, nor do they have any financial relationships that relate to this research. We are grateful to seminar participants at the University of California, Berkeley for helpful feedback.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors conceptualized the research. L.T.B. collected, processed and cleaned the data. L.T.B. constructed the figures and tables. All authors contributed to writing, reviewing and editing the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–7, Tables 1–9, discussion, methods and references.
Supplementary Data
Complete country- and city-level lists of CDDs.
Supplementary Software
CDD_code_20191018.R corresponds to the code used for the main analysis, while cdd_extraction_tutorial.pdf provides a tutorial for readers who would like to work with 5 km_18C.tif (see Source Data Fig. 1).
Source data
Source Data Fig. 1
Raster file used to generate Figure 1. It contains average annual CDDs from 2009 to 2018 at a 5 km by 5 km resolution.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Biardeau, L.T., Davis, L.W., Gertler, P. et al. Heat exposure and global air conditioning. Nat Sustain 3, 25–28 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0441-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0441-9
This article is cited by
-
The social costs of hydrofluorocarbons and the benefits from their expedited phase-down
Nature Climate Change (2024)
-
Personal Thermal Management by Radiative Cooling and Heating
Nano-Micro Letters (2024)
-
Country-level energy demand for cooling has increased over the past two decades
Communications Earth & Environment (2023)
-
Change in cooling degree days with global mean temperature rise increasing from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C
Nature Sustainability (2023)
-
Association between thermal stress and cardiovascular mortality in the subtropics
International Journal of Biometeorology (2023)