The Hutt City Council will be teaming up with the Lower Hutt-based Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit as part of Climacare, a project backed by NZ$19.8m in funding from the European Union (EU)’s Horizon Europe programme to help vulnerable urban neighbourhoods prepare for extreme heat.

Lower Hutt joins Seville in Spain, Athens in Greece, Istanbul in Türkiye, and Southampton in England on the project.

Lower Hutt mayor Ken Laban said being selected for the project reflected the council’s strong climate leadership and commitment to a resilient city where people and communities thrived.

“The project aligns with the council’s Climate Action Pathway and its wider work to improve climate resilience for local communities.”

Climacare will draw on urban planning, engineering, health and architecture to develop measures such as emergency operating procedures, passive cooling strategies for buildings and redesigned public spaces.

Although technology and infrastructure had improved to cope with extreme climate events, Family Centre spokesperson Charles Waldegrave said there was still a “big gap” in New Zealand and overseas when it came to planning for “really vulnerable” people - such as those in rest homes, the chronically ill or people with limited mobility - during a “very serious climate event”.

Climacare was developing a framework of key indicators to guide heat-mitigation measures with local authorities, civil society organisations and universities.

The framework would be tested in controlled experiments across five demonstration cities: Istanbul, Athens, Seville, Pécs in Hungary and Alba Iulia in Romania.

“We have to identify environmental metrics: shaded places, cooling water spaces,” Waldegrave said.

Other indicators included socio‑economic measures to identify communities vulnerable to extreme heat, such as low‑income groups, rest homes and people with chronic illnesses.

He said the team now needed to turn these indicators into GIS maps that identify neighbourhoods with key risk factors and vulnerable residents, so those areas can be used in the experiments.

After the experiments in the five demonstration cities, Lower Hutt - along with Southampton and Oppeano in northern Italy – would take the learnings and replicate the model, adapting it to local conditions.

While Climacare primarily focused on extreme heat in urban environments, researchers believed the measures developed from it could be replicated for other extreme weather conditions such as floods, earthquakes or tsunamis.

“It’s a process that is unusual because, normally, civil authorities just tell people what to do, and that doesn’t get a lot of good compliance,” he said. “It also isn’t well-informed by the vulnerable groups.

“You're working out together how these groups can be supported through these disasters, and also how we can have preventive aspects in the local environment that can ease it for people.”

Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air