Urban resilience refers to the ability of an urban system to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity. Mitigation and adaptation actions are capable of enhancing the resilience, which is an important necessity for cities. For actions to be efficient, these need to be based on a sound understanding and quantification of the drivers of urban transformation and settlement structures, human and urban vulnerability, and of local and global climate change, as defined by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) and the New Urban Agenda. Understanding and quantification are only possible through observations.
Copernicus, as the means for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation (EO), is based on its continuously evolving Core Services. A major challenge for the EO community is the innovative exploitation of the Copernicus products in dealing with the multidimensional problem of urban sustainability towards increasing urban resilience. To meet this challenge, information from more than one Copernicus Core Services, namely the Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), the Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Emergency Management Service (EMS), is needed. Furthermore, to address urban resilience, the urban planning community needs spatially disaggregated environmental information at local (neighbourhood) and city scales. Such information, for all parameters needed, is not yet directly available from the Copernicus Core Services, while several elements - data and products - from contemporary satellite missions consist valuable tools for retrieving urban environmental parameters at local scale. Cross-cutting applications among the above Copernicus Core Services are capable of coping with the required scale and granularity by integrating and exploiting satellite and third-party data, in-situ observations and modelling.
The CURE project (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe) provides the means to cope with the EO data under-exploitation in the domain of sustainable and resilient urbanisation, by combining products of different Copernicus Core Services. Therefore, CURE enables Copernicus to better serve cross-cutting applications at European scale by introducing novel ideas on how applications for climate change adaptation and mitigation, healthy cities and social environments, as well as energy and economy are developed across Copernicus Core Services.
CURE demonstrated the potential of Copernicus to provide valuable information for urban resilience, supported by third-party data and in-situ observations. The main research question addresses, whether and to what extent the Copernicus Core Services are able to provide reliable information for enhancing the resilience of European cities. CURE answers this question by developing cross-cutting applications combining products from the four above-mentioned Copernicus Core Services.
Urban areas need to be resilient, sustainable, inclusive, safe, resource-efficient and innovative, incorporating a circular economy and smart infrastructure. Given the vast and growing inventory of Copernicus Core Services, there is an exciting opportunity to develop synergies among them, which would be able to provide city administrations with useful multifaceted information to improve urban resilience through the CURE System. The CURE System is expected to be a relevant and timely tool to help urban planners and policy-makers enhance or track the local progress on the achievements of the resilience targets (e.g. connected with SDG 11). Consequently, CURE has the potential to provide the necessary building blocks for development of downstream applications for impact assessment, urban planning and policy making, becoming in this way a focused evidence-based toolkit for assisting current and future policy making in the field.
