Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence

Abstract

Australia is considered by many to be a warm climate country and hence winter cold and its health effects are often overlooked. The majority of the Australian population live in temperate climate regions, which are heatingdominated and experience cold wintertime conditions. The prevalence of cold in Australian homes has to date been rarely measured or estimated, and the few studies that do are based on proxy data that estimate a low prevalence (around 5 %). This paper tests these proxy measures, using high resolution temperature data on indoor temperature from 100 homes across temperate Australia. The data were assessed using the World Health Organization's Housing and Health guideline for minimum indoor temperature (18 ◦C), which provides an internationally recognised benchmark for defining cold in homes. Across the sampled homes, 81 % were below 18 ◦C on average across the whole of winter (June–August 2022). Average winter indoor temperatures were 16.5 ± 2.7 ◦C across all homes, with no significant difference between locations. These early findings suggest that the problem of unhealthily cold homes in Australia is likely to be significantly more prevalent than previously estimated. Far from affecting 5 % of Australian households, the affected population may be 10 times this value. These initial findings have important implications for how we model health impacts and develop policy. This early release data from a recently commenced large environmental monitoring project is of timely importance. It challenges our understanding of the prevalence of cold housing in Australia context, flagging the pressing need to increase policy attention in advance of winter.