Trouble sleeping? Climate change may be to blame, and according to researchers, it’s only going to get worse.
Sounds serious, doesn’t it? Hospitality and MultiFamily industries, especially those who cater to active lifestyles and our older generations, may have to handle some fallout from their tired residents, especially in light of heightened health risks.
“On top of the global warming that we are experiencing, which is warming in most land-based regions faster at night than during the day, we also have more people moving into urban environments where the urban fabric itself—the asphalt, the lack of greenery—releases heat at night when people are sleeping. So it creates this urban heat island effect, which amplifies nighttime temperatures,” said Kelton Minor, a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science and the lead author of the study that used data from more than 10 billion sleep-duration measurements from tracking wristbands across 68 different countries and combined that with local weather and climate data, an Inside Climate News article reports.
Donald Edmondson, a social psychologist and the director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said the study was one of the first to measure the effects of climate change on sleep patterns and that it is significant. He said that “one analysis has shown that when people sleep for fewer than 6 hours, they are as much as 50 percent more likely to have a cardiovascular event.”
Minor and his team found that by 2099, people could lose anywhere from 50 to 58 hours of sleep annually—the equivalent of two and a half days when combined or 11 nights of short sleep per person per year. “And that number is going to increase,” Minor said. “But how much it increases will depend on the actions we take today to lower the future burden of nighttime temperature on human slumber. And we don’t know at this point in time which trajectory we will take within the Earth’s climate system. We are in control of our destiny,” he said. “We have to act as a society if we want to make a dent.”
I LOVE my sleep guys, so I was speechless after reading this enlightening, but a depressing article by Victoria St. Martin. Besides company-mandated naps during the day (anyone?), how about using more clean energy and making an impression on those that rely on us to lead the charge – our kids, our employees, and our customers.
How to begin, you ask? Well, there’s this company called Zen Ecosystems that wants to help. In addition to decreasing energy costs, and setting up automated green energy usage to reach sustainability goals, therefore, assisting with global warming, we can easily add Indoor Air Quality monitors to work seamlessly within your Zen management suite. With IAQ tools, you can flush out & refresh the air depending on alerts or programs per occupancy. Zen offers easy solutions to combat serious issues. Unless that napping policy catches on, contact us to start positively affecting your world today.
