Copernicus for urban resilience in Europe

The urban community faces a significant obstacle in effectively utilising Earth Observation (EO) intelligence, particularly the Copernicus EO program of the European Union, to address the multifaceted aspects of urban sustainability and bolster urban resilience in the face of climate change challenges. In this context, here we present the efforts of the CURE project, which received funding under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme, to leverage the Copernicus Core Services (CCS) in supporting urban resilience. CURE provides spatially disaggregated environmental intelligence at a local scale, demonstrating that CCS can facilitate urban planning and management strategies to improve the resilience of cities. With a strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement, CURE has identified eleven cross-cutting applications between CCS that correspond to the major dimensions of urban sustainability and align with user needs. These applications have been integrated into a cloud-based platform known as DIAS (Data and Information Access Services), which is capable of delivering reliable, usable and relevant intelligence to support the development of downstream services towards enhancing resilience planning of cities throughout Europe

Vergleichende Analyse von Fallbeispielen Regionaler Integrierter Vulnerabilitätsassessments: WP2 Synthesebericht

Dieser Bericht enthält die Ergebnisse der im Projekt RIVAS durchgeführten vergleichenden Analyse von 14 internationalen Fallbeispielen regionaler integrierter Vulnerabilitätsassessments. Konzept und Methodik der Projektanalyse werden in Kapitel 2 erläutert. Kapitel 3 enthält die wichtigsten Ergebnisse der projektspezifischen Analyse in Form von projektbezogenen Zusammenfassungen, während in Kapitel 4 Ergebnisse des projektübergreifenden Vergleichs für wichtige Vergleichsdimensionen dargestellt und diskutiert werden. Am Ende der Sub-Kapitel zu jeder Vergleichsdimension findet sich eine Zusammenfassung und kurze Bewertung der Analysebefunde. In Kapitel 5 werden wesentliche Herausforderungen bei der Planung und Durchführung von partizipativen regionalen Vulnerabilitätsanalysen sowie Einsichten und Lösungsansätze zu deren Überwindung im Sinne einer Materialsammlung zusammengestellt. Im weiteren Projektverlauf dienen diese Inhalte als Basis zur weiteren Entwicklung der abschließenden Schlussfolgerungen und Empfehlungen. Mit Ausnahme der projektspezifischen Zusammenfassungen in Kapitel 3 ist dieser Bericht in deutscher Sprache verfasst, weil sich das Projekt RIVAS vorrangig an österreichische Zielgruppen wendet. Die "Executive Summaries" wurden auf Englisch verfasst, weil ein beträchtlicher Teil der herangezogenen Literatur in englischer Sprache vorliegt. Für die AutorInnen sollte diese Vorgangsweise in weiterer Folge die wissenschaftliche Publikationstätigkeit erleichtern

Sustainability transitions to low-carbon societies: insights from European community-based initiatives

This special issue presents one of the first systematic, comparative, and multi-dimensional assessments of the contribution of "community-based" or grassroots initiatives to a transition towards a low-carbon society. The papers characterize and quantify the impact of activities across many different domains of community engagement, such as community gardens, solidarity purchasing groups, community-supported agriculture, alternative food networks, recycling, sustainable mobility, and renewable energy

Heating and cooling energy demand and related emissions of the German residential building stock under climate change

The housing sector is a major consumer of energy. Studies on the future energy demand under climate change which also take into account future changes of the building stock, renovation measures and heating systems are still lacking. We provide the first analysis of the combined effect of these four influencing factors on the future energy demand for room conditioning of residential buildings and resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Germany until 2060. We show that the heating energy demand will decrease substantially in the future. This shift will mainly depend on the number of renovated buildings and climate change scenarios and only slightly on demographic changes. The future cooling energy demand will remain low in the future unless the amount of air conditioners strongly increases. As a strong change in the German energy mix is not expected, the future GHG emissions caused by heating will mainly depend on the energy demand for future heating.Global warming Degree days CO2 equivalent emission factor

Relating climate compatible development and human livelihood

We explore the link between improvements in human development and greenhouse gas emission. We argue that a disaggregated view on human development is required to understand the potential for decoupling of development from greenhouse gas emissions. To do so, we relate 16 elements from the livelihood index to emissions. Improvements in livelihood are decoupled from emissions for 10 elements, while only 6 are related to significant emissions. We operate the proposed framework for the example of food consumption and related emissions and find a reduction potential of about 13% compared to the total emissions from this sector

Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe: Final results from the CURE project

A major challenge for the urban community is the exploitation of Earth Observation intelligence in managing in the multidimensional nature of urban sustainability towards enhancing urban resilience, particularly in relation to the challenges of climate change. This study presents the ways in which the H2020 funded project CURE (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe) synergistically exploited Copernicus Core Services to develop cross-cutting applications supporting urban resilience. CURE provided the urban planning community with spatially disaggregated environmental intelligence at a local scale, as well as a proof-of-concept that urban planning and management strategies development enhancing the resilience of cities can be supported by Copernicus Core Services. Here, we demonstrate the technical operational feasibility of an umbrella cross-cutting system on urban resilience, consisting of 11 specific applications. These use Copernicus core products from at least two services each as main input information, reflect the main urban sustainability dimensions and are relevant to user needs, which were identified based on a strong stakeholders' engagement. As a result, CURE is built on Data and Information Access Services (DIAS), as a system integrating these cross-cutting applications, capable of supporting downstream services across Europe, enabling its incorporation into operational Copernicus products portfolio in the future and also addressing its economic feasibility. For more information on CURE: http://cure-copernicus.e