Urban Heat Island, the missing links: smart Monitoring & Evaluation and Citizens engagement

July 2023 and October 2023 have been the hottest than ever at global level. Last summer Southern Europe experienced extreme heat, breaking many local high temperature records. Climate warming and heat peaks are exacerbating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, the relative warmth of a city compared to surrounding rural areas. Solutions able to mitigate urban overheating can prevent energy demand for cooling increase (there might be up to 14 billion items of cooling equipment in 2050!) and generate multiple effects on comfort and health, air and water quality and biodiversity, but also on urban regeneration and socio-economic development. So far main UHI measures in Sustainable Energy and Climate Action and/or Adaptation and Resiliency Plans seem to lack a suitable integrated and participated approach as well as monitoring and evaluation (M&E) strategies. Yet some exemplary plans do exist and can show the way to new approaches. Opportunities from digitalisation, smart city technologies and citizens availability to participate in planning and data collection remain underexploited. Mobile computing and mobile-based technologies allowing for participatory planning tools and co-creation, citizen science, volunteered geographic information (VGI) are integrating innovative concepts to increase UHI awareness, generate big-data and empower cities and communities to reduce the UHI effect. But only a few smart cities, – like Barcelona, currently combine bottom-up data, evidence-based planning and M&E. Reliability, privacy and interoperability constraint impede the spread of such applications. After recalling the state of the art of M&E and participation in climate adaptation plans, the paper provides some examples of urban overheating mitigation policies and actions encompassing these two aspects. Then, it briefly mentions what advancements smart cities applications can offer: for instance, greatly simplified UHI estimations through mobile transects for a widespread availability of ambient temperature data without the need for costly equipment and many hours of dedication by the researchers. Finally, the paper showcases a possible participatory M&E approach embedded in the new Rome adaptation strategy and inspired by the selected best practices. This second part is based on findings from a field study in municipal nursery schools, where an outdoor evaporative cooling system may locally reduce the outdoor air up to 5 °C and ensure the thermal comfort conditions for the majority of the interviewees who had before experienced overheating outside of the misted zone. The success of the initiative kicked off the idea of implementing a program for the real time monitoring and alerting of cool shelters in the city of Rome, by integrating an existing Smart City Platform (SCP).