Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HARMONIA (Development of a Support System for Improved Resilience and Sustainable Urban areas to cope with Climate Change and Extreme Events based on GEOSS and Advanced Modelling Tools)
Reporting period: 2022-12-01 to 2023-11-30
As of now, more than 70% of Europe’s population lives in urban areas, which are increasingly feeling the effects of climate change. From air pollution, to urban heat islands, flash floods and sinkholes, climate change in cities takes many forms which threaten human lives and livelihoods. In this context, the Harmonia project will empower Climate Change (CC) mitigation and adaptation measures by providing a platform dedicated to urban environments. This platform, the Integrated Resilience Assessment Platform (IRAP) will allow urban stakeholders such as municipal administration members to not only understand but also visualize the effects of Climate Change in their municipality, therefore constituting a powerful and innovative Decision Support System. In a second time, this platform will also be a tool to measure the efficacity of the mitigation and adaptation measures implemented by the cities. Harmonia pilot cities are Piraeus, Ixelles, Milan and Sofia, each monitoring a specific set of parameters from the two pillars Harmonia focuses on: a) Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC: urban flooding, soil degradation and geo-hazards (landslides, earthquakes, ground deformation) and b) Manmade hazards: heat islands, urban heat fluxes, air quality, gas emissions.
Using satellite and auxiliary data available on the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and other services, Harmonia will incorporate multi-disciplinary knowledge and assessments, address hazards connected to climate change, and identify and define intervention necessity indices.
Using satellite and auxiliary data available on the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and other services, Harmonia will incorporate multi-disciplinary knowledge and assessments, address hazards connected to climate change, and identify and define intervention necessity indices.
The Harmonia project launched its activities in June 2021, which was quickly followed by reaching out to the urban domain community through tailored communication about the project. Some relevant tasks started and ended during the first reporting period setting the ground for further progress of the project. Performed activities mainly concerned four key points: i) stakeholders identification, ii) definition of the user requirements, iii) definition of the system requirements, iv) design of the system architecture. The analysis of the stakeholders' groups and the related definition of user requirements has seen a fruitful collaboration between technical partners and the municipalities, paving the way for future communication in the most effective way. In the later months of the project, the Citizen As Observatories initiative was launched, which will be developed further in the next reporting period. The aim of the initiative is to populate the Harmonia platform with data coming from the citizens of the four pilot cities. On the technical side of the project, a demo explaining the datacubes function has been created and local data was transmitted by the pilot cities to the technical partners, thus pursuing the data acquisition, collection and integration process. Participating in a similar process, data sets from various sources (such as CAMS) were identified. Investigation of hazard-specific conditioning factors, analysis of collected data, and investigation of state of art concerning Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques are in progress, participating in the preparatory stage of the creation of single and multi-hazard susceptibility maps for the project’s pilot cities.
Harmonia leverages a wealth of existing Earth Observation Datasets and services ‒ including GEOSS, Copernicus and ESA data and services which will be capitalized with ensemble modelling of socio-economic and in-situ data to deliver a platform, the IRAP, allowing stakeholders to model a range of planning options against a number of CC scenarios. The IRAP will address multi-hazard risk factors and help streamline the process of preparing for, and responding to, CC-related hazards. While progress has been made, there is still a lack of research and development focusing on climate change induced urban hazard and disasters using a wholistic approach integrating EO big data and other data to support planning resilient and sustainable cities. HARMONIA aims to fill the gap with the dedicated services to the urban environment, citizens’ wellbeing and health, and disaster resilience and to support Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Paris Agreement as well as the other GEO engagement priorities such as the Agenda for Sustainable Development in a scalable, AI/ML/DL-enabled Integrated Resilient Assessment Platform dedicated to cities. This will support local decision making and foster a wide range of applications dedicated to climate adaptation and mitigation, generating important long-term socio-economic benefits and contributing to the implementation of the Paris Agreement and Sendai framework. Sustainable reconstruction of urban areas and the health of humans and ecosystems are top priorities. Harmonia will take into account the local ecosystems of European urban areas, following an integrated and sustainable approach by incorporating the active communities’ participation initiative, which will involve the use of a social platform. Paying extra attention to Sustainable Urban Development, one of the Societal Benefit Areas posits that use of EO is a crucial tool towards resilient cities and the assessment of urban footprints, to promote equity, welfare and shared prosperity for all, feed new indicators for the monitoring of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals in an EU context.