Assessing heatwave resilience in municipalities around Lake Balaton: A comparative analysis

Abstract

Changing climate patterns represent a major challenge for Hungarian municipalities, particularly with regard to the increasing severity and frequency of heatwaves. As a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, thousands of people moved to communities around Lake Balaton; therefore, cities and villages should place more emphasis on their long-term sustainability and climate resilience. This article addresses the literature gap in assessing the heatwave resilience of Hungarian settlements, focusing on the municipalities of the Lake Balaton Resort Area. Our main objective was to uncover spatial and temporal patterns in the 180 settlements involved in the analysis by using an indicator-based comparative method. The set of indicators included nine sensitivity and six adaptive capacity measures referring to the base years 2015 and 2022. Our results show heterogeneous spatial patterns across the analysed categories; however, several regional clusters can be identified: 1) in general, settlements from the northern part of the study area had above-average adaptive capacity, while the southern and south-western municipalities had significantly lower values, 2) only one micro-regional cluster can be defined in terms of sensitivity values in the northern part of the study area; 3) below average resilience values were found in the south-western and southern areas; 4) finally, neither sensitivity nor adaptive capacity nor overall resilience scores had changed significantly over time at the regional level. The applied methodology can easily be adopted in other Hungarian or even Central and Eastern European cities; consequently, new results can contribute to a better understanding of inter- and intra-regional patterns of heatwave resilience at the local level.