ClimateUmbral — press kit
The map of official climate shelters and cool places across Europe — with a one-tap finder for people who are too hot right now, in five languages. Free, open source, no accounts, no tracking.
The one-paragraph version
Heat killed an estimated 61,700 people in Europe in the summer of 2022 (Ballester et al., Nature Medicine). Cities respond with climate-shelter networks — cooled public rooms — but each city publishes its list separately, if at all. ClimateUmbral aggregates them onto one map: 939 official climate shelters from Barcelona, Paris, Vienna and Grand Lyon (from each city's own open data, refreshed continuously), plus air-conditioned public places across all of Europe from OpenStreetMap. A panic-simple finder at climateumbral.eu/#cool locates the nearest cool room in one tap, shows opening hours and walking directions, and speaks English, Spanish, Catalan, French and German.
Verifiable facts
air_conditioning tag — verified
rendering in 16 cities from Sevilla to Warsaw, including cities
with no official shelter list.The underlying science
- Ballester et al., Nature Medicine 2023 — 61,672 heat-related deaths in Europe, summer 2022.
- Iungman et al., The Lancet 2023 — over 4% of summer deaths in 93 European cities attributable to urban heat islands; 30% tree cover could prevent about a third.
- Ballester et al., Nature Medicine 2024 — adaptation measurably reduces deaths at equal temperatures.
Story angles
- Service: "Where to cool down in [city] this week" — the finder answers it for any European city, with hours.
- Accountability: which cities publish their shelter networks as open data — and which don't (most don't).
- Crowd: every OpenStreetMap contributor who tags a cool café improves the map for their whole city.
Assets & contact
- Live site: climateumbral.eu — screenshots may be reproduced freely (data attributions apply, shown on the map).
- Printable poster: climateumbral.eu/poster.html
- Contact: contact@climateumbral.eu · GitHub.