Barcelona Metropolis

Cities are engaged in the fight against climate change. Promoting public transport and renewable energies, urban transformation and reducing emissions from combustion vehicles are urgent measures, but adaptation and mitigation measures are also needed to guarantee people’s health and well-being. The setting up of cooling shelters is one of the actions being rolled out in cities such as Barcelona, Brussels, Paris and Rotterdam to provide spaces offering shelter and thermal comfort at critical times such as during heatwaves.

Climate change affects the entire planet, but there are ecosystems, regions and even specific locations where the rising temperatures caused by human activities are more evident and poignant. Big cities are an example of this. And within these cities are districts and neighbourhoods with significant differences in temperature – as is the case in Barcelona –, which bears a greater impact on the elderly and the most vulnerable.

Historically, cities shared relatively moderate climate phenomena, such as heat islands. Such islands are characterised by a slight increase in temperature in urban centres – compared to the thermal gradient of the periphery – owing to the number of buildings, infrastructure, paved areas, motor traffic and atmospheric pollution. Global warming adds to the heat island phenomenon to turn some cities into places that are hard to live in during the summer and, especially, during heatwaves.

Barcelona is no exception. It is rather a negative example of the impact of climate change on cities, an exponent of the need to act locally against global warming. Figures from the Agència de Salut Pública de Barcelona [Barcelona Public Health Agency] (ASPB) reveal that, over the last three decades (the period with the most marked increase in climate change), 150 people die in Barcelona every year on average due to the effects of extreme heat. The year 2003 marked a record for heatwaves in the city, with 13 summer days with temperatures well above average. Specifically, from 8 to 16 August, temperatures exceeded 38°C.

The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) points out that, according to the most up-to-date scientific studies, if the current trend continues, temperatures will have seen an overall rise of 2°C by 2050 (compared to the average pre-industrial levels) and will have climbed a further 3°C by 2100.

The target set in the Paris Agreements (of 2015) is to act on a global scale to limit the increase to 1.5°C on average, but, even so, in cities like Barcelona this figure is clearly exceeded in summer periods, the ICTA-UAB claims. Extreme weather episodes, such as heatwaves, are more frequent now, and will be even more so in the future “and they will especially affect the people most vulnerable to heat: children and the elderly”, highlights the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology.

City responses to the climate emergency

The Climate Plan passed in a plenary session by Barcelona Municipal Council in October 2018, the Climate Emergency Declaration of January 2020 and the 2030 Climate Emergency Action Plan approved in 2021 are responses to this challenge that exerts a growing impact. “The 2018 Climate Plan was a first step to providing the city with tools to adapt and mitigate the impact of climate change, with heatwaves being one of the situations in which the problem of people’s health and well-being comes to the fore”, Eloi Badia, Councillor for Climate Emergency and the Ecological Transition of Barcelona, tells us.

The conclusions of this scientific evaluation are still being compiled and prepared for official publication, but Mònica Ubalde informs us that the findings have been positive in many respects. Two of the conclusions that can be drawn from the rolling out of the cooling shelters in Barcelona since the project’s outset are, on the one hand, the need to work not only on setting them up but also on their constant maintenance and improvement, and, on the other, leveraging the knowledge acquired from setting up the schoolyard cooling shelters to expand the network and the corresponding facilities to other public spaces. “Schools are strategic locations distributed throughout the city, and many of the things that have proven effective as cooling shelters in schools can work in other spaces”, concludes Mònica Ubalde.

Preparing schools for climate change

A second scientific project, in this case coordinated by experts from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya [Open University of Catalonia] (UOC), is also working on the analysis of the transformative impact of climate action measures such as those being implemented by the Refugis climàtics a les escoles initiative. In this case, the project is called CoolSchools. European in scope (covering schools in Brussels, Paris and Rotterdam), it enjoys the participation of 16 partners, including city councils, universities, research centres, associations and social cooperatives. The research has funding of more than 1.5 million euro for the next three years, provided by the European Fund Urban Transformation Capacities (JPI Urban Europe), in which the State Research Agency participates.

Isabel Ruiz Mallén, head of this project and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the UOC’s Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA), explains that “the solutions that are being implemented aim to protect pupils from the risks arising from climate change, and improve schools’ adaptation in this new context”. “What we want to see from the actions that are being implemented in these four cities is the impact that these actions have in terms of urban sustainability, resilience to climate change, social justice and the promotion of quality education”, describes the expert from TURBA, a UOC group that concentrates its work on the analysis of socio-environmental and technological urban transformations from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective. Beyond specific actions, the researcher Isabel Ruiz Mallén recalls that these socioeconomic transformations in schoolyards “aim to be revitalising social changes in urban districts and to act as catalysts to also transform homes and the neighbourhood.”