Municipal environmental exposure profiles for climate adaptation in the Netherlands

Every town faces a unique mix of environmental challenges. Some places bake under intense heat, while others struggle with drying soil or sudden, heavy downpours. In the Netherlands, where the landscape is flat and water is a constant presence, local governments must plan for these conditions to keep their communities safe. The difficulty lies in the fact that these problems rarely happen in isolation. A town might have plenty of trees to cool the streets but still face a high risk of flooding, or it might be dry and hot but safe from rising rivers. To make smart decisions, planners need to see the full picture of how these different pressures combine, rather than looking at heat, drought, or rain as separate, unrelated lists.

Scientists have long tried to solve this by creating single scores that rank towns based on their overall risk. However, these rankings often hide the details. If a town gets a high score because it is very hot, that number might mask the fact that it is also very dry, or that it has excellent protection against floods. A single number cannot tell a planner whether to focus on planting trees, building higher dikes, or improving drainage. To get a clearer view, researchers need a way to group towns that share similar combinations of these environmental conditions, creating a map of distinct profiles rather than a simple ladder of risk.

A researcher named Joshua Osejigbe Aguele set out to create such a map for the Netherlands. He worked with data from a national climate dashboard that tracks five specific environmental factors across the country's municipalities. These factors include how much tree canopy covers the ground, how deep the groundwater drops during a drought, how often temperatures feel extremely hot, and the extent of exposure to both river flooding and heavy rain that causes surface water to pool. The goal was not to measure how vulnerable a town is in terms of its people or buildings, but simply to describe the physical environment itself. By looking at these five elements together, the study aimed to find recurring patterns that distinguish one type of town from another.

The researcher began by gathering data from 342 municipalities, eventually focusing on 337 towns where all five measurements were complete. He treated each town as a point in a complex space defined by these five variables. To make sense of the tangled relationships between them, he used a statistical method that finds the main directions in which the data varies. This process revealed that the five indicators could be understood through two main themes. The first theme contrasted towns with high levels of drought, heavy rain, and tree cover against those with high flood exposure. The second theme highlighted a clear divide between heat and tree cover, showing that towns with more trees generally experienced less intense heat. These two themes explained more than 70 percent of the differences between the towns, suggesting that a small number of underlying patterns drive the environmental conditions across the country.

Using these patterns, the researcher grouped the towns into four distinct profiles. The first group consisted of 52 towns that stood out for having the most tree cover and the least heat exposure. The second group, the largest with 133 towns, was characterized by low risks of flooding and heavy rain, though they still faced significant heat. The third group, containing 136 towns, was dominated by a high risk of flooding, with water exposure being their defining feature. The final group was a small but distinct cluster of 16 towns that faced an extreme combination of deep drought and heavy rain, despite having low flood risk. These four groups represent different environmental realities that local planners would need to address in different ways.

To ensure these groups were real and not just an artifact of the math, the researcher tested the stability of the results. He repeatedly shuffled the data and re-ran the analysis to see if the same towns kept falling into the same groups. The results were robust: the large groups of flood-prone towns and low-risk towns remained almost exactly the same every time. Even the small, extreme group of 16 towns held together well, though the boundary for the tree-rich group was slightly less rigid. The researcher also tested whether the results changed if he adjusted how he measured the drought data or how he calculated the flood exposure. In almost every case, the four groups remained clearly recognizable, with the towns staying in their assigned profiles even when the numbers were tweaked.

The study explicitly avoids claiming that these profiles prove which towns are the most dangerous or which solutions will work best. The groups describe the physical environment, not the social or economic factors that determine how well a community can cope. A town with high flood exposure might have strong defenses, while a town with low exposure might be fragile. The value of this work is that it provides a clear, shared language for describing these environmental combinations. Instead of arguing over a single ranking, planners can now say, "We are a flood-exposure town," or "We are a drought-heavy-rain town," and use that specific label to guide their next steps.

This approach offers a practical tool for adaptation planning. By identifying which towns share similar environmental configurations, officials can focus their investigations on the specific pressures that matter most to their location. A town in the flood-exposure group needs to look at its dikes and drainage, while a town in the heat-and-low-canopy group needs to focus on shade and cooling. The study confirms that these distinct profiles exist and are stable, but it also reminds us that they are just the starting point. To truly understand vulnerability and plan effectively, these environmental maps must be combined with local knowledge about the people, housing, and institutions that live within them. The profiles do not solve the problem of climate change, but they provide a much clearer picture of where to begin.