Wake-up call as climate change means ‘people will be getting less sleep’

CLIMATE change means people will be getting less sleep due to soaring temperatures, according to a study.

The research suggests that people will enjoy up to 10 minutes less kip per night as a result of global warming by the end of the century.

They found that increasing ambient temperatures negatively impact human sleep around the globe as they get their head down later, but wake up earlier.

The team says their findings suggest that by the year 2099, suboptimal temperatures may erode 50 to 58 hours of sleep per person per year.

They also found that the temperature effect on sleep loss is “substantially larger” for residents from lower income countries as well as in older adults and females.

Study first author Kelton Minor said: “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.”

He said that it’s long been known that hot days increase deaths and hospitalisations and worsen human performance, yet the biological and behavioural mechanisms underlying theoe impacts have not been well understood. Recent data from the United States has suggested that subjective sleep quality decreases during periods of hot weather.

But how temperature fluctuations may impact changes in sleep patterns in people living across a variety of global climates has remained unclear.

Mr Minor, a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said: “In this study, we provide the first planetary-scale evidence that warmer-than-average temperatures erode human sleep. We show that this erosion occurs primarily by delaying when people fall asleep and by advancing when they wake up during hot weather.”

The study, published in the journal One Earth, suggested that on very warm nights – greater than 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit – sleep declines an average of just over 14 minutes. The likelihood of getting less than seven hours of sleep also increases as temperatures rise.