**Appendix D Challenges**

C1—Human impact on the environment: since the potential impact of human actions increases more and more, the influence they can have on the social and environmental context is always greater. Knowing how to propose actions that limit potentially negative impacts on the environment appears, therefore, to be a challenge for interventions in vulnerable communities.

C2—Climate change and consequences: mitigation, adaptation, and resilience are the main three concepts for responding to the consequences of climate change (COP23) [88]. Knowing (1) how to choose which of these three options best suites to the intervention context and (2) which strategy is the most appropriate to the vulnerable reality, is a challenge that will become more and more relevant in the coming decades. In fact, the effect of climate change in vulnerable communities is undoubtedly a global emergency. Therefore, knowing how to consciously intervene in these situations is (and will increasingly be) a main challenge in these contexts.

C3—Health environment: The uncontrolled development during the recent decades has seriously endangered the quality of the environment in which most vulnerable communities live. Pollution, lack of basic services, and poor education are the main causes of environments with poor levels of health. Improving the environment and raising awareness on healthy quality of life represent new challenges for the society in the coming decades.

C4—Technological development: The technological capabilities, which are becoming more and more preponderating, open a panorama of unprecedented opportunities for vulnerable communities and a worrying scenario of an increased gap between the more and the less vulnerable sectors of the society. For this reason, offering interventions able to bring technology closer to vulnerable communities takes on a very important role in the community empowerment processes [89,90].

C5—Political responsibilities: Political attention to vulnerable communities is often reduced due to the low weight that these realities can assume at the electoral level. This situation, added to an increasingly scarce decision-making power represents a very significant challenge for interventions in vulnerable communities. In fact, these interventions must propose solutions capable of activating processes of political responsibility.
