Description:

Limassol is considered highly vulnerable to climate change, due to its geographical location, socio-economic factors, and the city’s existing environmental challenges. The combination of rising temperatures, shifting weather patterns, and inadequate urban planning increases the city’s susceptibility to climate risks. Limassol is one of the hottest cities in Europe during summer, with temperatures exceeding 40°C. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves, amplifying the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and risk of wildfires. Limassol’s urban layout, with dense buildings and limited green spaces, exacerbates the UHI effect even more. Cyprus is already facing water scarcity while climate change is expected to worsen drought conditions and reduce rainfall. Further, Limassol is vulnerable to both coastal flooding and river flooding due to intense rainfall events, which are becoming more common with climate change. The city’s aging drainage infrastructure is often unable to cope with sudden heavy rains, leading to flash floods that can cause significant damage to infrastructure, homes, and businesses.

The Pathways2Resilience (P2R) open call is a first-class opportunity to increase the resilience of the city of Limassol in the face of climate change, allowing the city to become a key actor for mitigation of the impacts of climate change and adaptation. Following P2R’s approach of transformative climate adaptation, Limassol intends to build resilience by addressing the underlying systemic drivers of exposure and vulnerability to climate risks, employing capacity building and innovative methods towards climate resilience. In this project, the Municipality of Limassol joins forces with the CYENS Center of Excellence, which brings large experience in climate and risk modelling, contributing with cutting-edge tools, emerging technologies and methodologies that will materialize novel climate resilience practices. The existing public commitments of Limassol serve as a strong indicator and motivator that the city will keep its promises, mobilize its resources and harness the funding provided by P2R in the best possible manner towards long-term sustainability.

Limassol is committed to the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change and has created a 2030 Climate Neutrality Action Plan, plus an Investment Plan. These plans cover multiple aspects of climate resilience, but they are not complete, as they miss key methods and approaches for situational understanding, risk assessment and roadmaps for transformative climate adaptation actions. Limassol is still weak in various dimensions of the resilience trajectory. Therefore, our strong aim is to harness this opportunity provided by the P2R funding to improve our action and investment plans, and better prepare for climate adaptation, mitigation of climate risks and climate neutrality.

Techniques used: Aerial photography, Multispectral satellite Sensing, Artifical Intelligence, Computer Vision, Modelling, Geospatial Analytics.

Collaboration with: Municipality of Limassol (Partner)

Started: January 2026

Status: On-going

Funding: Limassol Path to Resilience Project is funded by the European Union as part of the cascade funding call of the Pathways2Resilience (P2R) project.