A wake-up call for a global climate and sleep task force

The nighttime ambient environment in which humanity sleeps is heating up due to human-induced climatic changes. Convergent global observational evidence links higher ambient temperatures to accelerated sleep impacts within-individuals, while in-lab evidence confirms that high temperatures mechanistically harm sleep initiation and maintenance. Despite marked methodological and evidentiary advances, the global sensitivity of sleep health to climate impact drivers remains imprecisely characterized and conservatively estimated. Indeed, we show that prior observational temperature and sleep research is nonrepresentative of the global human population, and that the most vulnerable remain undersampled despite evidence of their likely greater sleep sensitivity to heat. Here we sound a worldwide wake-up call for the sleep, climate and health research communities to address these needs through the formation of a global climate and sleep taskforce. This effort can perform a unified global assessment of climate-sleep relationships, impact pathways, and adaptation options in a variable and warming world. It can seek to integrate sleep health and methodological advances into global climate and health monitoring systems and economic assessments, and to translate these findings into scalable action. Persistent climate-sleep impacts and their downstream consequences to human health, wellbeing and performance warrant urgent study, mitigation and adaptation at the same global scale and across all levels of society. The international sleep research community must now act with the rigor, attention and resources needed to protect our nights.