Extreme heat has made headlines in urban areas across the West, in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, but a new analysis from Headwaters Economics and the Federation of American Scientists shows that extreme heat impacts rural areas just as much as it does urban areas.
The study looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Heat and Health Tracker to identify which ZIP codes had large populations of people whose health would be disproportionately impacted by heat.
Researchers then used that data to create a map of vulnerable ZIP codes, broken down by whether they’re urban and rural.
In Colorado, some rural areas with high vulnerability to extreme heat include parts of Chaffee, Garfield, Montrose, San Juan, La Plata, and Montezuma counties. Much of the Four Corners region is deemed highly vulnerable, including parts of Grand and San Juan counties in Utah.
The study found that rural residents are more likely to have pre-existing health conditions that make them sensitive to heat, like asthma or heart disease. Other factors that contribute to rural extreme heat risks are geographic isolation and demographic factors like age.
Rural areas are also especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, like severe weather events, power outages triggered by heat-related grid stress, and wildfires.
Grace Wickerson, the Senior Manager of Climate and Health at the Federation of American Scientists, is one of the lead authors on the study. She says rural economies present other unique risk factors for extreme heat, especially in the Mountain West.
“If you have a community that is more reliant on outdoor recreation economies, with folks working outside for long hours and long days and it’s really hot, that can impact those workers’ overall health,” she said, adding that industries like farming, forestry, and mining also employ large swaths of the rural workforce, and are also concentrated outdoors.
She says in the Mountain West, especially at higher elevations, infrastructure and the built environment create unique risk factors.
“The way that those communities were built was not for extreme temperatures,” she said. “You know, they might not have good air conditioning, or they’re built to keep in the heat, and so when it gets really hot, they just heat up and become almost furnaces inside.”
Housing, Wickerson says, represents a key area for resilience to rural extreme heat. The study says mobile homes account for 12% of rural housing stock, as opposed to 4% of urban housing, and are some of the most heat-vulnerable types of housing. Rural housing also tends to be more expensive to heat and cool, increasing burdens for residents.
Wickerson says researchers need more data on rural extreme heat, to help rural areas develop mitigation strategies that work for their communities.
“We just need more solutions that are rurally-focused and rurally-designed,” she said. “There are more studied interventions that are working, and work in urban areas like trees, like cooling centers, that just don’t translate over well into rural contexts, nor should they transfer in a one to one.”
A big part of that, she says, will be engaging rural communities to hear about what would work best for them.
“Do people want to travel long distances to get to a cooling center, or do they want to potentially shelter in their homes, or shelter with their neighbors?” she gave as examples. “And how could you potentially design those solutions so you can bring the right types of protections to communities, in the way that they need them?”
Wickerson also says investing in rural healthcare will be crucial in both responding to heat-related illnesses, but also in treating the pre-existing conditions that make someone vulnerable to extreme heat.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
