From heat risk to better adaptation investments in elderly care in Malmö, Sweden
Which measures protect residents from heat most effectively – and where does adaptation investment create the greatest benefit?
The challenge
For elderly care facilities, heat is not simply a question of outdoor temperature.
High indoor temperatures can affect residents’ comfort, increase their need for care and, at more extreme levels, pose serious health risks. For cities, this creates a difficult investment question: which measures should be implemented first?
Different interventions – from shading and trees to fans, roof measures or active cooling – reduce heat in different ways. Comparing them based on temperature reduction alone does not show what they mean for residents, care services or investment decisions.
Measuring what heat actually changes
The Malmö project combines climate and building data with factors that influence residents’ vulnerability to heat.
Resilens models heat impacts across three dimensions:
Comfort – how heat affects residents’ thermal comfort and well-being
Function – how heat can increase care needs and affect normal care delivery
Safety – how more severe heat can contribute to serious health risks
This provides a way to translate temperature and exposure into consequences that are relevant for both residents and the operation of a care facility.
"Heat is still a relatively new adaptation challenge for many Swedish municipalities. By looking at impacts, measures and their benefits together, this project can help build a stronger evidence base for how cities protect vulnerable people and prioritise future investments.”
Emanuel Toft, Climate Adaptation Manager, City of Malmö
Comparing adaptation measures
For each adaptation measure, Resilens compares expected heat impacts with and without the intervention.
Measures can act at different points in the pathway from outdoor heat to indoor exposure. Trees and cool surfaces can change conditions around a building, while shading, fans or active cooling affect indoor conditions more directly.
This allows measures such as shading, fans, active cooling, trees, cool surfaces and roof measures to be assessed within one common framework.
The key question becomes: "How much impact could this measure avoid?"
What we are learning
Preliminary results show that adaptation options can create very different benefits, even when they address the same underlying climate risk.
Differences in where and how measures reduce heat translate into different effects on Comfort, Function and Safety. This makes it possible to compare interventions based on the outcomes they are expected to create, rather than simply their technical characteristics.
Selected avoided impacts can also be translated into economic terms so that benefits for residents and care services can be considered alongside investment costs. This creates the basis for a more complete cost-benefit comparison of climate adaptation measures.
At the heart of the approach is a simple decision pathway:
Climate data can show where temperatures are rising, and risk analysis can identify vulnerable facilities. Resilens connects that information with the expected effects and economic benefits of different responses – providing a more transparent basis for adaptation investment decisions.
The next step is to enrich the platform with additional operational data and refine it together with the departments involved. Over time, the same approach will be extended beyond daycare centres to other types of social infrastructure, such as schools or care facilities.
What’s next
The work is still evolving. The next phase will improve temperature and thermal modelling, further refine how individual adaptation measures are analyzed and continue validating the results together with Malmö.
The project also creates a basis for applying the approach across additional elderly care facilities and potentially other forms of heat-sensitive social infrastructure.
Ultimately, the goal is simple: make the benefits of climate adaptation visible before investment decisions are made.
