Systemic Cooling Poverty at the urban scale: evidence from Venice Provincial Area

Copernicus Climate Change Observatory reports that 2024 has been the warmest year recorded since 1850, with global temperatures surpassing the 1.5 °C increase relative to pre-industrial levels. This escalation underscores the severe impacts of climate change, notably an amplification in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves (IPCC, 2023). In response, the European Commission’s 2025 report on Summer Energy Poverty highlights the multifaceted nature of SEP and explores strategies to enhance societal resilience. Heat stress constitutes a critical health threat, necessitating immediate, well-informed policy interventions that prioritize the assessment of population exposure to heat as a key step toward fostering equitable and inclusive resilience. Recognizing a gap in existing literature concerning localized, multidimensional assessments of heat vulnerability - particularly within Italy - the present thesis aims to identify geographical hotspots and policy areas requiring urgent governance actions to enhance adaptive capacity to elevated temperatures and humidity. This is operationalized through the application of the Systemic Cooling Poverty Index, developed by Mazzone et al. (2023), at the Venice provincial level. The SCP Index consolidates socio-demographic, geospatial, climatological, infrastructural, and healthcare data within the R computing environment to evaluate the systemic factors influencing heat vulnerability across census areas.