Researchers from the University of Oxford assessed heat risk across 205 cities with populations exceeding one million.
Their framework goes beyond simple temperature exposure by combining three critical factors: heat hazard, population vulnerability, and coping capacity, with the findings recently published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society.
The study ranks cities based on a composite risk score, an overall rating that merges safety, health, climate, and infrastructure data into a single measure. The higher the score, the greater the combined risk.
Among the 50 cities with the highest composite heat risk, Ho Chi Minh City ranks 16th while Hanoi is placed at 34th.
Within Southeast Asia, HCMC is second only to Quezon City in the Philippines, which ranks fifth worldwide.
