A new study from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona reveals that Sant Boi de Llobregat is among the municipalities in the metropolitan area at the highest risk of suffering climate gentrification, a phenomenon that expels the most vulnerable residents from their neighbourhoods due to the revaluation linked to adaptation to extreme heat.
The green peripheries of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, such as Sant Boi de Llobregat, are emerging as new hotspots for climate gentrification. This is highlighted by a study from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), which places the Baix Llobregat locality among the municipalities most vulnerable to this process, alongside Badia del Vallès, Valldoreix (Sant Cugat), Sant Adrià de Besòs, Castelldefels, and Torrelles de Llobregat.
The research, led by researchers Isabelle Anguelovski and Amalia Calderón-Argelich, has developed the Climate Justice Ready index, a platform that analyses climate vulnerability street by street in 36 metropolitan municipalities. The project, already published openly, allows any citizen to check the risk of their neighbourhood based on dozens of environmental and social indicators.
“We are not looking to analyse who is more vulnerable to climate change, but who is at risk of being expelled because their neighbourhood is being revalued,” explains Anguelovski. “Due to the rise in property prices, many people will have to move to more affordable areas, which unfortunately are often less green or exposed to the effects of climate change,” she adds.
The study reveals a surprising finding: the most vulnerable areas are not urban centres, but the metropolitan periphery. Municipalities like Sant Boi, Castelldefels, or Sant Adrià de Besòs are greener, less dense, well-connected, and far from commercial and tourist speculation, making them attractive destinations for those fleeing the heat and high prices of central Barcelona.
“The peripheries are areas with more green spaces, access to forests, and more attractive residential characteristics due to having larger and higher-quality architectural flats,” details Anguelovski. “Unlike traditional gentrification, here we do not measure proximity to the centre, services, and attractiveness, but rather environmental quality.”
The phenomenon of climate gentrification describes how municipal investment in heat adaptation infrastructures — such as green spaces, rehabilitation of waterways, or coastal improvements — can increase neighbourhood costs and displace vulnerable populations. This process has already been observed in cities like Boston and Miami, and the Climate Justice Ready project is one of the first to systematically analyse it in the Mediterranean context.
“It is important to think that as climate change brings us longer and more intense heatwaves, the priorities of the population may change. And areas where gentrification has not been discussed until now may become very attractive from an environmental and thermal comfort perspective,” notes Calderón-Argelich. “The problem is that this could happen in municipalities that are not prepared to manage everything that this could entail in terms of social inequalities and displacement,” she concludes.
For the residents of Sant Boi, the Climate Justice Ready tool is already available on the project’s website, where one can search for their neighbourhood and see how it compares to the rest of the metropolitan area. The study, published in the Journal of City Climate and Economy, underscores the need for public policies that anticipate these dynamics to avoid reproducing the inequalities that already exist in urban cores.
The Sant Boi City Council has yet to comment on the study's conclusions, but the research warns that without preventive measures, real estate pressure and the search for thermal comfort could expel families with fewer resources to cheaper and less well-equipped areas against the heat.
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