Heat Health Risk Assessment in Urban Areas

As climate change progresses, extreme heat is becoming more frequent, intense, and prolonged. The urban environment amplifies these risks through the urban heat island effect, heat-retaining materials, scarce vegetation, limited access to cool places, high population density and compact urban forms that reduce airflow, while absorbing heat, further intensified by impermeable surfaces and waste heat from human activities.

SDG Target 13.1 “Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries” calls for strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards, including heatwaves. Addressing this challenge requires tools that combine climate data, urban characteristics and population vulnerability. SDGs-EYES Heat Health Risk Assessment in Turin demonstrates how such integration can support evidence-based policymaking for urban health adaptation. This service produces a risk indicator that reflects climate hazard, exposure and vulnerability.

SDGs-EYES Heat Health Risk Assessment is a co-designed service that maps the spatial distribution of heat-related health risks in the city of Turin. It has been co-designed with users - including public authorities, health agencies, researchers, and environmental experts - to ensure usability and relevance in decision-making contexts. It delivers service-oriented data products that simplify the tracking and reporting of SDG 13.30.

By integrating Copernicus climate reanalysis data, health data, urban context and census-derived sociodemographic indicators, it produces a risk indicator that reflects climate hazard, exposure and vulnerability. The service identifies urban areas where heat stress coincides with the presence of at-risk populations. These include elderly residents, people with limited mobility or poor housing conditions, and neighbourhoods with low adaptive capacity. The result is a map-based tool that highlights where heat-health risk is highest and identifies its main determinants - at the level of individual urban census tracts - and consequently supports policy decisions such as prioritising cooling interventions or issuing heat warnings.

C5 integrates multiple climate data sources. The main datasets used include:

The Heat Health Risk Assessment service enables a shift from fragmented data analysis to actionable, place-based decision-making on climate-related health risks. At the policy level, the tool supports evidence-based urban adaptation by identifying where heat risk is highest and why. Local authorities can prioritise interventions such as cooling centres, urban greening, and targeted health services, improving the efficiency and equity of public action. At the operational level, the platform lowers the technical barrier for using complex climate data. Non-expert users can access ready-to-use maps and indicators, allowing public health professionals, planners and decision-makers to integrate climate considerations into their daily work without requiring advanced analytical capacity.

At the scientific level, the service combines Earth observation data with epidemiological and socio-demographic information, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the heat-health nexus. This supports the development of more robust and context-specific risk indicators. At the societal level, the tool contributes to protecting vulnerable populations—particularly older adults and socially disadvantaged groups—by enabling more targeted and timely interventions. This strengthens urban resilience and reduces health inequalities in the context of climate change. Finally, the co-design approach ensures that the tool is aligned with real user needs, increasing its uptake and long-term sustainability. In our case, it has also facilitated intersectoral collaboration, fostering interaction between health, urban planning, environmental and policy domains. By integrating into existing planning frameworks, the service helps translate climate data into concrete actions, moving from knowledge to implementation.