CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Kiszely, Anna Eszter |
|---|---|
| Title | The Heat Divide - Assessing Urban Heat Vulnerability and its Spatiality Across Budapest Through Geospatial and Multivariate Analysis |
| Summary | As climate change is making heatwaves more frequent and intense in Central Europe, urban areas face a growing risk due to the heat-amplifying effect of urban land cover along with socio-economic and demographic vulnerabilities. However, robust analyses on the differential vulnerability of urban residents to extreme heat have been scarce. This study aims to fill this gap by developing a novel, spatially explicit, data-driven heat vulnerability index (HVI) for the subdistricts of one of the biggest Central European cities, Budapest, combining demographic, socio-economic and infrastructural indicators with spatially derived data on land cover, and temperature data from satellite observations. Using principal component analysis (PCA), six distinct vulnerability dimensions are identified, challenging the conventional integrated vulnerability assessment framework segmenting vulnerability to three components of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. To better understand vulnerability structures, cluster analysis was employed to identify areas with similar distinct vulnerability profiles, while a geographically weighted PCA (GWPCA) was applied to identify leading vulnerability factors in the subdistricts. While the findings clearly point to subdistricts where heatwave mitigation should take priority due to extreme vulnerability, the results also show that urban heat vulnerability is driven by a complex, spatially specific interaction of socio-economic, demographic, infrastructural and urban structural factors. By revealing the spatial complexities of heat vulnerability and identifying influential components, the study provides a more nuanced basis for designing heat adaptation policies tailored to the urban fabric and socio-economic geography of Budapest and other Central European cities. |
| Supervisor | Lagutov, Viktor Vladimirovich; Ürge-Vorsatz, Diana |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy MSc |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/kiszely_anna.pdf |
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