Extreme heat doesn't affect everyone equally.

Extreme heat, the heat that most threatens our health, is not the same for everyone. There are enormous differences, especially in age and gender: it affects older people and women more dangerously and more widely. And first and foremost, there are social distancing issues, which affect not only the North and South of the world, but are also exploding dramatically in developed countries like Italy.

In practice, the Great Heat ends up hitting people with low incomes, low educational qualifications, and sparse social relationships much harder . And there's a huge difference between urban outskirts and historic city centers, which are certainly better equipped to withstand heat waves. The bottom line is that extreme heat reflects social inequalities and amplifies them, creating new factors of discrimination.

The Italian city with the most comprehensive and up-to-date studies on how extreme heat doesn't affect everyone equally is undoubtedly Turin. For years, the relationship between extreme heat and social distancing has been studied with scientific rigor.

In 2025, the study "Social vulnerability in climate change effects of a large city in Northern Italy: a case study of Turin" was published in Epidemiologia & Prevenzione , co-authored by Marta Ellena, Giulia Melis, Nicolás Zengarini, Eduardo Di Gangi, Guglielmo Ricciardi, and Giuseppe Costa. It was published in Epidemiologia & Prevenzione.

The most important conclusions are these:

• Climate risk is highly uneven within Turin. Therefore, it's not enough to say that "Turin is hot": some areas simultaneously experience greater heat exposure and greater social vulnerability.
• Peripheral areas, especially those in the north, are at greatest risk. Conversely, greener and less densely populated areas tend to have a lower risk.
• Heat is considered a complex health risk, not simply a meteorological issue. The authors combine three dimensions of the IPCC framework: hazard (intensity of the heat island effect), exposure (particularly the presence of an elderly population), and vulnerability (socioeconomic, demographic, health, and environmental factors).
• Social and environmental vulnerability tend to overlap. This is perhaps the most significant finding: people who have fewer resources to protect themselves from climate change they can be found precisely in the most thermally unfavorable urban areas.

A study like the one in Turin should be conducted everywhere, especially to identify the interventions needed. In terms of prevention, the study's message is very concrete. It doesn't simply say "we need to protect ourselves from the heat," but suggests shifting prevention from a one-size-fits-all model to one that is targeted at local and social levels.

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