Heat vulnerability assessment in an Eastern Mediterranean city - a mixed-methods approach

Abstract

Cities with already hot climates face distinct, intensifying challenges as global temperatures rise, particularly where existing urban and social conditions heighten vulnerability. Yet urban climate vulnerability assessments remain limited in such contexts, especially in smaller cities. This study presents a mixed-methods participatory heat risk assessment in Shefa-‘Amr, an Arab city in northern Israel, to explore how exposure, lived experiences, and adaptive capacity shape vulnerability to extreme heat. Findings indicate that while exposure to heat is relatively uniform across neighborhoods, there are areas with higher socioeconomic vulnerability and occupational exposure. Residents’ experiences portray heat as a familiar environmental stressor, embedded in daily life and partially managed through adaptation – yet still a persistent burden on health, wellbeing and finances, due to rising temperatures and limited adaptive capacity. This case study highlights that even where air conditioning is widespread, it cannot serve as a standalone adaptation strategy. The integration of spatial, quantitative, and qualitative data reveals both converging and diverging insights, including how uneven forms of social capital can affect collective adaptive capacity. The multi-dimensional approach also helps avoid some biases, for example demonstrating that despite some intra-urban variation, the city as a whole is more vulnerable to heat than national averages, reflecting the broader marginalization of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. For such cities or communities, equitable heat adaptation requires pairing incremental measures, locally actionable even with limited adaptive capacity (e.g., increasing urban shade), with measures that address national-level structural disparities, and thus strengthen the capacity to cope with heat, as well as with other stressors.