London: Summer days are growing hotter in the world's big cities at a significantly faster pace than the average rise in world temperatures.
It is a trend that could mean more deadly urban heatwaves in years ahead, scientists have claimed.
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In cities such as Paris, Houston, Moscow and Beijing, heat on the hottest summer days is growing two or three times as quickly as general temperature rises linked to climate change over the last 50 years, said researchers at the University of California-Irvine.
With more than half of the world's population now living in cities - and more than 65 per cent of people expected to live there by 2050 - rising city heat extremes could put billions at risk, particularly the poor, the researchers said.
"There are more than a billion people living in extreme poverty, with many of them living in megacities and large urban centres. These are people struggling to survive," said Simon Michael Papalexiou, an environmental engineer and the lead author of the study.
Most such people have no access to air conditioning or other alternatives to protect themselves, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
But in Paris, France, the increase per decade of the hottest temperatures recorded was nearly one degree Celsius, researchers found, with cities such as Barcelona, Houston, Moscow and Beijing also seeing big hikes.
Such increases have contributed to heatwave disasters, including almost 70,000 deaths in Europe in 2003, and about 55,000 deaths in Russia in 2010, the report said.
But the bigger worry is what will happen as more people crowd into bigger hotter cities, the authors said.
In the last two decades, the number of cities with at least five million people doubled, they reported.
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