HeatSafe: Mitigating Vulnerabilities to Heatwaves in Malmö

Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather event in Sweden.

Despite calls in the EU and Swedish adaptation strategies, heat-related social vulnerability is neither well understood in research nor in the practical work of local governments and municipal administrations.

Responding to the urge to improve heat risk management, HeatSafe will feed recent insights from several ongoing research projects on urban heat and social vulnerability, into the municipal planning and operations in City of Malmö. HeatSafe extends ongoing collaborations between City of Malmö and researchers from SEI, CSPR and BC3.

The project will further develop and validate a proposed Social Vulnerability Index and implement co-designed approaches to improve municipal planning and management of urban heatwaves.

The work will be organized into four work packages, each contributing to specific societal needs: WP1 co-develops an early warning system that will enhance the capacity of property owners and municipal functions to respond to heat events. WP2 co-designs a GIS-layer for dynamic citizen sensing of experienced heat in public outdoor spaces.

WP3 embeds the tools and approaches in the municipal administration to co-explore heat governance opportunities and co-develop an Implementation Strategy to support the municipal heat directive.

WP4 scales up the tools and approaches by producing and disseminating actionable recommendations and prototypes to other municipalities and property owners.