HeatSens Heat-Risk Mapping Platform
During a 2023–24 pilot ('The Heat Lab'), the council fed live weather, climate and social-vulnerability data into HeatSens, a risk-mapping tool built by local startup ClimaSens. 18 trained 'Heat Champions' and 47 active staff users piped its maps into the council's COMPASS system to help trigger heat responses.
📊 Impact
18 City of Melbourne staff trained as 'Heat Champions', 47 staff actively used the HeatSens platform during the 2023–24 pilot; risk data was uploaded into the council's internal COMPASS mapping system to help identify trigger points for heat action responses (evidence: official, Heat Lab Evaluation Report, Aug 2024).
🎓 Lesson
The evaluation found real value — cross-team coordination, a shared local definition of 'extreme heat', and a data trigger for action — but also real limits: heat/vulnerability data only resolves to ABS statistical areas, a third-party pool operator had no direct system access, and staff had too little time to use the tool fully. A caution against assuming an analytics platform alone substitutes for dedicated staff capacity.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · Urban heat island
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
Continue exploring
Compare this project
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “HeatSens Heat-Risk Mapping Platform” — Melbourne, Australia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/melbourne-heatsens-risk-platform/ (last verified 2026-08-01). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.