Abstract
Urbanization leads to local warming in addition to background climate change, which disproportionately impacts society due to the high population densities of cities. Scientific and media discourse around urban heat is often framed around intra-urban differences in hazard and exposure due to the spatial heterogeneity of cities and segregation of urban sub-populations. Since almost all multi-city assessments of income-based heat disparities are from the U.S., it is important to examine whether these patterns are replicated for cities in the Global South. Here, we use various gridded datasets, including satellite-derived estimates, to demonstrate that wealthier urban neighborhoods generally have higher heat hazard in the Global South, the opposite of the results seen for U.S. cities. This is because income/wealth distributions within these cities result from their unique cultural history and population-level living preferences, and do not follow typical U.S. patterns. Parallel analyses of intra-urban vegetation distributions, which modulate heat hazard, show more nuanced relationships with income, though the general results still differ from the those for the U.S. We recommend being cautious about treating scientific evidence from U.S. cities as the universal norm for understanding intra-urban heat risk and encourage more comprehensive urban heat vulnerability studies for the Global South.