Climate Change Will Shave Around 60 Hours Of Sleep Each Year By 2099, Study Finds

Climate change is set to cause some massive changes in lives on Earth and one of them would be a drop in the hours of sleep taken by a human.

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This is according to a new study conducted by University of Copenhagen researchers that states by the year 2099, suboptimal temperatures could shave out 50 to 58 hours of sleep per person each year.

To get to this conclusion, in the study, researchers used anonymised global sleep data collected from accelerometer-based sleep-tracking wristbands. The data included 7 million nightly sleep records from over 47,000 adults across 68 nations.

Researchers saw that on very warm nights -- above 30 degrees Celsius -- sleep drops at an average of just over 14 minutes. There was also an increase in the likelihood of getting less than seven hours of sleep as the temperatures rose.

Controlled studies conducted earlier in sleep labs saw that both humans and animals slept worse when the room temperature was either too hot or too cold. This study however was limited by how people went about their lives in the real world -- they modified their environmental temperature -- either using fans or air conditioning -- in order to get more comfortable.

The novel research however highlights that people are far better at adapting to colder temperatures than hotter ones. They saw that across seasons, demographics and different climates, warmer temperatures outside managed to erode sleep with the amount progressively increasing with warmer temperatures.

This was seen more in people from developing nations probably because most households in developed countries have air conditioning. But researchers didn¡¯t fixate on this being the reason since they didn¡¯t really have any data on AC access among subjects.

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First author Kelton Minor of the University of Copenhagen, explains, "Our results indicate that sleep -- an essential restorative process integral for human health and productivity -- may be degraded by warmer temperatures. In order to make informed climate policy decisions moving forward, we need to better account for the full spectrum of plausible future climate impacts extending from today's societal greenhouse gas emissions choices."

In future studies, the researchers wish to collaborate with global climate scientists, sleep researchers and tech providers to extend the scope of global sleep and behavioural analyses to other populations as well as contents.

They also aim to study the impact of rising outdoor temperatures on the sleep outcomes of incarcerated populations that live in hot climates who may have very little access to air conditioning.

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