New Study: ‘LGB individuals live in warmer places.’ – Study ‘tests whether lesbian, gay, & bisexual (LGB) individuals inhabit systematically warmer locations than their heterosexual peers’

The geographic distribution of sexual minorities reflects patterns of urbanisation, social tolerance, and economic opportunity. We combine gridded mean annual surface air temperature from the UK Met Office HadUK-Grid 30-year climatology (1991–2020) with Local Authority District (LAD)-level sexual orientation counts from the 2021 England and Wales Census to test whether lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals inhabit systematically warmer locations than their heterosexual peers. Across 311 matched LADs, the population-weighted mean annual temperature is 10.45°C for LGB residents compared with 10.33°C for straight/heterosexual residents—a difference of +0.12°C. This thermal differential reflects the well-documented concentration of LGB populations in major urban centres, particularly London, rather than any direct causal mechanism. Because the gridded temperature product does not resolve the urban heat island effect at its 5 km spatial resolution, our estimate constitutes a lower bound on the true population-weighted temperature differential.

Introduction

Sexual minorities are not uniformly distributed across geographic space. In the United Kingdom, as in comparable economies, LGB individuals are disproportionately concentrated in large cities, drawn by economic opportunity, social anonymity, and the density of community infrastructure (1, 2). The geography of climate across the UK is similarly structured: mean annual temperatures decrease with latitude and elevation, and increase with proximity to the Atlantic and to urban centres (3). Whether these two spatial gradients—of sexual minority concentration and of temperature—overlap sufficiently to produce a detectable aggregate thermal signature has not previously been examined. Here we quantify this effect using publicly available census and climate data at LAD resolution for England and Wales.

Results

Temperature assignment. Mean annual surface air temperature from the HadUK-Grid 5 km climatology was aggregated to 361 UK LAD boundaries by nearest-centroid (Voronoi) tessellation, assigning each 5 km grid cell to the LAD whose published centroid lay nearest in British National Grid coordinates. LAD mean temperatures ranged from 3.4°C (Highland, Scotland) to 12.1°C (several inner London boroughs), consistent with established north–south and urban–rural gradients (3).