The number of hot days, meaning those exceeding 35°C, is continuing to rise, increasing the need for air conditioning. Enrica de Cian, Professor of Environmental Economics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, explains how access to air conditioning reveals energy inequalities.

The impact of air conditioning on bills is considerable, and it tends to reinforce inequalities between those who can afford to access and maintain it and those who cannot. With my research team, we studied eight developed countries with different climates: Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Our study (published in August 2020 in the journal Economic Modelling) reveals that households equipped with air conditioning have annual electricity expenditures between 35% and 42% higher than those without air conditioners.

The increasing use of air conditioners to cope with heat waves has given rise to a new form of precarity. A household is considered precarious if its energy expenditures on heating and cooling exceed 10% of its income. Until now, this term referred to households unable to afford adequate heating in the winter, but the use of air conditioning is pushing more people into this situation.

We calculated (in a study published in March in Nature) that by 2050, 60 million Europeans and 640 million Indians will be exposed to heat waves while unequipped with air conditioning. In Brazil, India and Indonesia, between 20% and 30% of households will be unable to meet their cooling needs in 2050, and will therefore find themselves in heat stress, according to another study we conducted (published in Nature in November 2021).

According to projections, of the richest 10% of households in the world, at least 80% will be equipped with air conditioning by 2050, compared with 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 less than half of a country like France, even though the climate is much warmer. More than 80% of the Indian population has no access to air conditioning due to lack of means. The Indian regions with the highest temperatures are also the poorest, where air conditioning is not widely available.

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