The past two summers of 2024 and 2025 left little doubt about where Greece stands in the unfolding climate crisis. Both ranked among the hottest on record, with prolonged heatwaves, nighttime temperatures in our cities persistently above 26°C, and a growing recognition that what was once seasonal discomfort has become a structural threat to public health, housing, and everyday urban life. Greece sits firmly on the European frontline of climate change, yet the tools we use to understand, communicate, and respond to climate risk remain underdeveloped, fragmented, and unequally distributed.
At geosophik, we believe that meaningful climate resilience begins with awareness, and that this awareness requires open, accessible and spatially grounded knowledge.
The challenges we face are not only meteorological. Greek cities concentrate climate risk in ways that have been shaped by decades of policy choices and institutional limitations. Our building stock is among the oldest and least thermally efficient in Europe, with the majority of urban housing constructed before the introduction of meaningful insulation standards. Athens and Thessaloniki rank among the least green cities on the continent, far below the World Health Organization's recommendations for urban green space per resident. Adaptation policy, where it exists, leans heavily on short-term, investment-driven retrofit programmes that reach only those who can afford to participate. Spatial planning legislation has historically prioritised growth over resilience, leaving municipalities with limited tools to address the urban heat island and the convergence of climate vulnerability with housing precarity and energy poverty. Behind each of these structural problems lies a quieter one: the absence of open, harmonised, spatially detailed data that would allow citizens, researchers, and local authorities to understand who bears the heaviest burden, and where.
This is where mapping, as a technical practice, becomes essential. Through open spatial data, census records, building registers, satellite-derived green space indicators, climate observations and free, transparent tools such as QGIS, it is possible to construct vulnerability maps that reveal the uneven geography of climate risk across Greek cities. Such maps can identify the neighbourhoods where aging housing stock, aging residents, dense concrete urban fabric, and minimal green infrastructure converge to produce intensifying exposure during heatwaves. They can support evidence-based local policy, ground collective knowledge for climate resilience, and translate abstract climate statistics into a documented picture that can be more readily interpreted and acted upon.
The mission of geosophik's urban and spatial research unit is to build, share, and democratise this kind of knowledge. We work with open data sources, open methodologies, and open outputs, because climate resilience concerns all of us directly. By mapping the spatial dimensions of climate vulnerability, heat, housing, energy poverty, and the unequal distribution of green space, we aim to support a public conversation about just adaptation that is connected to the lived, everyday realities of Greek cities.
The unbearable summers are no longer a forecast of the future. They are an everyday experience. Mapping them openly is one of the first steps toward changing them.