Heterogenous Association Between Mortality and Environmental Factors

Abstract

The global environment has changed rapidly since the Industrial Revolution. Human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have warmed our earth, leading to more climate extremes. Human activities have also caused air pollution and, thus, worse air quality. Warmer climates and polluted air pose severe risks to human health. This paper focuses on temperature and air pollution as the primary environmental factors and studies their relationship with mortality across different ethnicity and age groups in the U.S. from 2001 to 2021. The main research methods employed in this paper are correlation analysis and least-square regressions. This paper finds that, on average, environmental factors are moderately and positively related to total deaths at a statistically significant level. Such a positive relationship still holds when I further investigate how the environment is associated with mortality by each individual cause. Moreover, heterogeneity in the relationship is identified among different races. In particular, temperature seems to have a larger impact on the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Black populations. At the same time, air pollution is observed to have a very strong association with the mortality of the Asian population, Pacific Islanders, and Hawaiian Natives. Finally, age disparities are not that significant. One finding worth pointing out is that children and teenagers (Age 1-14) appear to be more susceptible to air pollution than other age groups.