Rome, Italy’s capital, is a large and complex metropolitan city with nearly 2.9 million residents and more than 3 million usual inhabitants when commuters and non-resident users are included. With its Mediterranean climate, extensive territory and highly differentiated urban fabric, Rome faces climate risks that affect both its historic core and its wider metropolitan communities.
Rome matters to JUST4CARE because climate change is already reshaping everyday life across the city. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, heavy rainfall, flooding, strong winds and pressure on infrastructure are increasingly affecting public space, mobility, buildings and essential services. These impacts are especially serious for vulnerable groups, including elderly people, children, people with chronic illnesses, low-income residents and those living in precarious housing conditions.
Rome’s interest in JUST4CARE is closely aligned with the project’s just resilience perspective. The city is seeking approaches that can help it better understand vulnerability, anticipate long-term impacts and ensure that adaptation policies are designed with and for the communities most at risk. For Rome, resilience must be both data-informed and socially inclusive.
Through this learning process, Rome is particularly interested in improving how vulnerability is identified and understood, how future impacts can inform policy formulation, and how financial and resource allocation tools can support more equitable climate adaptation.
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Detailed information:
Rome is situated in the central part of Italy, approximately 25 kilometers from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city’s territory is characterized by a mix of flat and hilly areas, with the Tiber River flowing through it. Rome’s climate is Mediterranean, with hot summers and mild winters. Rome is the capital of Italy, with a surface area of 1,287 km² and 2.87 million residents, and a total of more than 3 million usual residents, including those people who live or work in Rome without being formally resident. The city is divided into fifteen municipalities, each of which has an area equal to that of medium-sized Italian cities. The municipalities represent their respective communities, look after their interests, and promote their development within the unity of Rome as the Capital. The Metropolitan City is a supra-territorial institution with planning responsibilities, including 121 municipalities in the surrounding area, including Rome Capital.
Rome is a city where rising temperatures are causing increasing changes and impacts across the entire city, particularly in urban areas, putting people’s lives at risk through increasingly intense and frequent floods, heatwaves, and prolonged periods of drought, as well as strong winds, and causing damage to infrastructure, public spaces, and buildings. In recent years, Rome has seen significant changes in terms of rising temperatures and variations in rainfall patterns. Istat data highlight a trend of rising temperatures between 1971 and 2021, with the highest values recorded in the last decade. Rainfall patterns are also changing, with wet years alternating with dry years, longer periods without rainfall, and, at the same time, more intense rainfall on certain days. Rome is also the municipality in Italy that, according to statistics, is suffering the most from the impacts linked to the increased frequency and intensity of floods and heavy rainfall.
The consequences are evident in the flooding caused by heavy rainfall, which periodically brings the underground, regional trains, and surface public transport to a standstill and halts traffic in underpasses and on roads, requiring civil protection services to intervene to ensure the safety of people and property. They are also evident in the increasingly frequent days of strong winds, as well as tornadoes and storm surges along the coast.
Rome is facing major challenges due to climate change, including rising temperatures, droughts, and extreme weather events. The city is committed to implementing effective adaptation measures to safeguard its citizens and infrastructure from these growing threats.
Specific Vulnerability Challenges
Vulnerable groups in cities are disproportionately exposed to climate-related risks, mainly due to socio-economic, health, and housing factors that exacerbate the effects of extreme events. The main risks include:
Heatwaves and Urban Heat Islands: Densely built-up urban areas, characterised by concrete and a lack of vegetation, become ‘heat islands’, recording significantly higher temperatures (up to 10 degrees higher) than the surrounding rural areas. Vulnerable groups — the elderly, people with chronic illnesses, young children, pregnant women, and outdoor workers — are the most affected, with an increased risk of mortality.
Flooding and heavy rainfall: The sealing of urban soil increases the risk of flooding during heavy rainfall events, which are becoming increasingly frequent.
Social and economic inequality: People on low incomes, the unemployed, and the homeless face greater vulnerability due to precarious or inadequate housing (energy poverty) and limited ability to adapt.
Water scarcity and air quality: Climate change is reducing access to drinking water and worsening air quality, exacerbating respiratory and health problems. These impacts are exacerbated by the inadequacy of certain urban environments, which often lack sufficient green spaces to mitigate them. Indeed, the city of Rome is planting many trees, particularly in the historic centre.
Alignment with JUST4CARE
Rome must prepare to deal with climate change scenarios that could exacerbate the impacts and, consequently, the risks to which the city, its economy, and its social fabric are exposed. The objective aims to foster (favorire) a more inclusive and just approach to climate resilience by ensuring that vulnerable communities are actively involved in decision-making and benefit from adaptation initiatives. The project implemented in pilot cities where equitable, data-driven solutions will be developed and tested.
These solutions will be co-created with local communities and stakeholders, ensuring active participation and the implementation of equity-oriented policies. Additionally, AI-driven models will be used to integrate climate justice principles into risk assessments. The project will foster collaboration between cities and regions, allowing for the replication of effective solutions.
Replication Objective
From these initial stages of the project, one objective that we believe we can certainly replicate is to identify and undestanding vulnerability, to have a future orientation and anticipation of long-term impacts of vulnerability, and policy formulation. It would be interesting to replicate the solution for finance and resource allocation.
It is hoped that this project will help us understand how to reach the most vulnerable and least visible sections of society, which are becoming increasingly difficult to reach.