Mortality, Temperature, and Public Adaptation Policy: Evidence from Italy

Filippo Pavanello and Giulia Valenti
Additional contact information
Giulia Valenti: Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

No 2025.35, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: In 2004, Italy introduced a national program to address heat-related health risks, combining public awareness campaigns, heat-wave warning systems, and hospital protocols. Leveraging administrative mortality data and high-frequency temperature variation, we show that the program reduced heat-related mortality by more than 57% on days at or above 30°C. To identify the mechanisms, we exploit the staggered introduction of heat-wave warning systems across provinces and show that treated areas experienced substantially larger reductions in heat-related mortality. We further document that information disclosure plays a key role in driving these reductions. Overall, our findings underscore the importance of public adaptation policies that rely on information provision to cost-effectively mitigate the health impacts of extreme temperatures.

Keywords: Temperature; mortality; adaptation; information; warning systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... loads/NDL2025-35.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Mortality, Temperature, and Public Adaptation Policy: Evidence from Italy (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2025.35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).