“The adoption of air conditioners to cope with heat waves brings out a new form of precariousness”

2023-08-20 14:48:15

The number of scorching days, that is to say exceeding 35 degrees, continues to grow, increasing the needs of populations for air conditioning. Enrica de Cian, professor of environmental economics at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, and researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, explains how access to air conditioning is an indicator of inequalities energy.

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While air conditioning sometimes becomes essential for survival, what is the impact of its use on the household budget?

The impact of air conditioning on bills is considerable and tends to reinforce the inequalities between those who can afford to use and maintain it, and those who cannot afford it. With my research team, we studied eight developed countries with varying climates: Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Our study [publiée en août 2020 dans la revue Economic Modelling]reveals that households equipped with air conditioning have annual electricity expenditure between 35% and 42% higher than those without air conditioning.

Today, fuel poverty in Europe is mainly linked to cold spells. Is the situation likely to change?

The adoption of air conditioners to cope with heat waves has brought about a new form of precariousness. A household is considered precarious if its energy expenditure for heating and cooling exceeds 10% of its income. While this term has until now designated households that cannot afford to heat themselves properly in winter, the use of air conditioning is pushing more people into this situation.

We calculated [dans une étude publiée en mars dans Nature] that in 2050, 60 million Europeans and 640 million Indians will be exposed to heat waves and not equipped with air conditioning. In Brazil, India and Indonesia, between 20 and 30% of households will not be able to meet their cooling needs in 2050, and will therefore be in a situation of heat stress, according to another study that we conducted [parue dans Nature en novembre 2021].

What are the consequences of such phenomena on inequalities?

According to projections, of the 10% of the richest households in the world, at least 80% will be equipped with air conditioning in 2050, compared to 2% to 23% for the poorest 10% of households. Only 15% of the 3.5 billion people living in hot climates have air conditioning while some regions, such as North America, are over-equipped. In India, the population’s current equipment rate is more than half that of a country like France, even though the climate is much warmer. More than 80% of the Indian population does not have access to air conditioning due to a lack of means. The Indian regions with the highest temperatures are also the poorest, where air conditioning is not very democratized.

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