Quantifying heat exposure and its related mortality in Rio de Janeiro City: evidence to support Rio’s recent heat protocol

Under a climate change scenario, extreme heat episodes show an increase in frequency and intensity, with a scaling impact in Latin American cities. Recently, Rio de Janeiro City developed its heat protocol, using the amount of hours spent over specific heat thresholds as its trigger metric. This study gathers mortality data by 17 different causes in Rio, in a 12.5 year period (2012-2024). We use Distributed Lag Non-Linear Models (DLNM) to assess the relationship between different heat exposure metrics to mortality among the young (< 65) and elderly (>=65y), including a novel metric called Heat Area Above a Threshold (HAAT). In the study period, there were 466,121 deaths in the city from natural causes. Deaths due to diabetes, hypertensive diseases, Alzheimer’s/dementia, renal failure and even undetermined deaths were strongly associated with extreme heat episodes, especially among the elderly. The proposed HAAT metric showed better performance on explaining mortality for most causes (10 out of the 17), when compared to temperature or heat index, or commonly used heat wave definitions. The results dialogue with Rio’s heat protocol, evaluating the cut-off points defined and proposing simpler definitions using the HAAT metric. An exposure to a HAAT of 64°C*h increases mortality by natural causes by 50%, and 91.2°C*h already doubles the mortality risk. Main strengths of the study lie on the comparison of different heat exposure metrics and the investigation of cause-specific mortality in a period when recent and remarkable heat waves occurred. There is still fragility when considering a compound index such as the Heat Index, and social and spatial differences on heat-related mortality should also be considered in future models. The proposed metric, however, appears as a relevant indicator to distinguish unusually warm days that lead to elevated mortality, and could guide definitions for Heat Warning Systems.