UW Postdoc Liutao Chen (Urban Design & Planning) led a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, with CSDE Affiliates Joan Casey (EOHS) and Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen (Urban Design & Planning; EOHS) and co-authors TC Chakraborty and Ching-Hsuan Huang. The team demonstrated how the choice of heat metric and definition of extreme heat days fundamentally alters estimates of population heat exposure and inequality. Using summer 2022 data across the Mediterranean, the study compared four heat metrics under both absolute and relative threshold frameworks.  Critically, the relationship between heat exposure and deprivation reversed depending on the framework: absolute thresholds concentrated exposure in more deprived North Africa and the Middle East, while relative thresholds shifted the burden toward less-deprived European cities.