Climate-driven hot nights cut sleep ~56 hrs yearly

A new global analysis finds that rising nighttime temperatures, driven by climate change, are significantly eroding sleep quality worldwide, with the average person losing nearly 56 hours of sleep annually due to hot nights. The report, released by the research group Climate Central, analyzed data from 1,338 cities across two periods, 2020 to 2025 and the early 1970s, to quantify the impact of human-caused warming on sleep.

Globally, an estimated six hours of the annual sleep loss, or just over 10 percent, is directly attributable to climate change. The analysis reveals that the climate change-related portion of heat-driven sleep loss has at least doubled since the early 1970s across nearly every city studied. In the United States, this impact has roughly tripled, rising from just over one hour annually in the early 1970s to about four hours in the recent period.

The effects are not evenly distributed. Cities in the Middle East, including those in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, experienced the greatest climate-related sleep losses. Residents there lost an estimated 55 to 87 hours of sleep annually because of hot nights, with 12 to 16 of those hours linked to...