Heat at the Edge
Mapping urban heat vulnerability in Kalamata — a medium-sized coastal city in southern Greece — using an open-data composite spatial framework.
Heat vulnerability research in Greece has concentrated on Athens and Thessaloniki. Smaller coastal cities remain largely unexamined, even though they face compounding pressures that metropolitan frameworks were never designed to capture: coastal microclimates with elevated humidity and restricted urban ventilation, dense built environments with limited green infrastructure, and tourism-driven seasonal intensification. Kalamata sits at the intersection of all three.
The approach
We build a composite spatial index from openly available datasets, integrating population distribution, built-up intensity, and relative access to green infrastructure — operationalised as green space as a proportion of total urban area. A seasonal-population layer captures where the summer population expands most sharply. The result is a set of vulnerability maps that reveal spatial patterns of exposure beyond conventional surface-temperature assessments, and that can support evidence-based local adaptation and spatial planning.
Coastal amplification
The project introduces the concept of coastal amplification of heat vulnerability: the argument that edge conditions — humidity, sea-breeze dynamics, seasonal population fluctuation, and coastal spatial configuration — mediate and intensify the impacts of extreme heat. In this framing, Kalamata functions as a sensitive indicator of emerging socio-environmental pressures across Mediterranean coastal systems.
- StatusIn progress
- Focus areaClimate Resilience
- LocationKalamata, Peloponnese
- DataELSTAT 2021 Census, Copernicus, open meteorological records
- ToolsQGIS, open spatial data
- OutputVulnerability maps and methodology, presented at the Hellenic Geographic Society Conference, November 2026