Climate change: Sleep loss has doubled in the last 50 years in all major cities worldwide (Study)

A new study by Climate Central reveals that across all 1,338 major global cities analyzed, temperature-related sleep loss attributable to climate change has at least doubled since the early 1970s, with serious health consequences.

This is the first analysis to directly quantify the number of hours of sleep lost due to climate change, combining cutting-edge research on the effect of temperatures on sleep with the latest advances in attribution science.

With global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, nighttime temperatures are rising even faster than daytime temperatures, posing a growing and serious risk to public health. The science is clear: sleep is essential to our health, and climate change is disrupting it by raising nighttime temperatures, the study reports.

According to a new analysis by Climate Central, globally, high ambient temperatures have led to an average loss of nearly 56 hours of sleep per year between 2020 and 2025. More than 10% of this sleep loss is attributable to global warming.

According to this new analysis, between 2020 and 2025, residents of Middle Eastern cities experienced the greatest sleep losses related to climate change. Cities in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates lost between 55 and 87 hours of sleep per year due to rising nighttime temperatures, with 12 to 16 hours of that loss attributable to climate change.

Sleep losses linked to climate change were also significant in other already hot regions: people in southern India and several Southeast Asian countries were losing 78 to 91 hours of sleep per year due to rising nighttime temperatures, of which about eight to nine hours were due to climate change.

Similarly, in some West African cities, particularly in Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, residents were losing 65 hours or more of sleep per year, of which approximately 10 to 11 hours were linked to climate change.