Webinar | Space applications for urban challenges 2: Climate adaptation and resilience
Live session time: 26 September at 10:00 CET
Watch the webinar video
You can access the presentations used in OMC Webinars here.
Agenda
- 10 min Introduction to SPACE4Cities and the Open Market Consultation (Aerospace Valley)
- 30 min Presentation of the Climate Adaptation Challenge and its sub-challenges:
- Wildfires and urban heat islands (Attica/Athens)
- Flood and water-related risks (District09, Ghent)
- Green elements and climate adaptation in the urban space (Forum Virium Helsinki)
- 20 min Requirements and evaluation criteria (Gemeente Amsterdam)
- 10 min Q&A
- 10 min Presenting the Pre-Commercial Procurement process (Forum Virium Helsinki)
- 10 min Q&A
- 5 min Wrap up and next steps (Aerospace Valley)
Context
As part of SPACE4Cities’ Open Market Consultation (OMC), the OMC Webinar Series aims to foster interactions between our procurer cities and all kinds of suppliers – companies, research institutes or non-profits. Participating in the webinar allows to directly ask questions to procurers via Slido, to anticipate procurers’ needs and to prepare for the €2.87 million call for tenders by influencing our requirements. The webinar will be recorded and made available to registered participants after the event. See the full agenda below.
For the first time in the EU’s recent history, weather- and climate-related events caused around 25,000 fatalities and costed more than 100 billion euros (Reference: Economic losses on weather (europa.eu)) in only two years (2021-2022). To reduce the scale and pace of the unavoidable consequences of climate change, the EU updated its Climate Adaptation Strategy in 2021, emphasising on local resilience. Indeed, while climate change is a global emergency, climate impacts and solutions are local by nature. Initiatives like the Covenant of Mayors (with 4,500 European members) showed the need for urban adaptation and resilience at this level.
Among climate adaptation solutions, Climate services are digital tools aimed at triggering climate action and decision-making at all policy levels, including local governments. These services greatly rely on Earth observation (EO) data, like Sentinels data or Copernicus Climate Change Service information which monitor, forecast and model our climate. For local authorities, EO data provides crucial inputs to climate risk assessments (CRAs) on topics like urban heat islands, droughts, heavy rains, floods, erosion, storms or wildfires. GNSS is also used to a lesser extent to model climate and atmospheric changes. Knowing their vulnerabilities, cities can prepare short and long-term adaptation policies building on the latest science.
For the half of European cities (Reference: Urban adaptation in Europe: what works? — European Environment Agency (europa.eu)) that set up a climate adaptation plan, the next step consists in going from assessment to action. To that end, EO also helps to mitigate climate-related risks by optimising, monitoring and even modelling the implementation of nature-based solutions, like urban blue and green infrastructures (afforestation, parks, revegetation, green roofs, retention ponds, etc.). GNSS, on its side, is a major tool for early warning systems when climate hazards effectively happen.
Eventually, at the end of the policy-making process, EO contributes to monitor impacts of urban adaptation policies, as EO data allows to compare changes at urban level. Unbiased and well-pictured, satellite images are also very powerful communication tools to raise awareness about climate impacts not only to citizens, but to civil servants and elected officials as well.