The impact of climate change on local water management strategies. Learning from Rotterdam and Copenhagen

Cities around the world, as highly anthropized areas, are negatively suffering the impact of climate change. The awareness of intergovernmental and national institutions, has allowed the development in recent decades of policies and strategies for the reduction of climate-changing gas emissions in the environment, through the implementation of adaptation and mitigation actions, in order to implement local actions aimed at managing the different problems arising from the effects of climate change in the cities. The characteristics of the urban environment amplify the effects of climate change, sometimes with disastrous consequences, especially on people. Among the phenomena that have most direct effects on the population, extreme rainfall and pluvial flooding put the safety of people at risk. Water management has thus become one of the most addressed topics in local adaptation policies and strategies. The objective is to investigate policies, strategies and plans for adapting to climate change by the cities of Copenhagen and Rotterdam, in order to understand the implementation processes and identify environmental climate adaptive design actions as best practices to be replicated in others urban contexts relating to the water management issues, to define an urban system of spreaded actions on the surface of cities to make them climate proof

The Gloominess Didn’t Control Me

What my Covid-19 experience was like for me and people living around me. Class assignment, Western Civilization, Professor Marino

Definition of Urban Built Environment Climate Adaptive Design Actions Aided by Environmental Data-Driven Design Processes

Environmental and technological design for climate adaptation in the urban built environment can no longer be separated from the generation, collection, or use of data (big data). ICT tools (Information and Communication Technologies), for the modelling and simulation of the built urban environment are identified as measuring devices and provide knowledge on the impacts of climate change in design practice based on an environmentally data-driven approach. This study aims to define a framework for the evaluation of environmental health and comfort parameters applicable to simulation tools, with a specific focus on thermal and environmental exchanges between indoor and outdoor spaces, to define those factors that affect the perception of user’s well-being in thermal stress conditions (e.g., heatwaves), both indoor and outdoor. Through the definition of two study cases in the city of Naples, Italy, special attention was paid to inves-tigating the interaction between outdoor and indoor performance when urban temperatures rise. A comparison between a daily survey for occupants and simulations was conducted to confirm the validity of the data obtainable from the perceived thermal sensations. The obtained results show that the designed framework can reliably simulate real outdoor and indoor conditions according to comfort indices such as the predicted mean vote and adaptive comfort model. The methodo-logical framework developed can guarantee the interoperability of data to simulate indoor and outdoor environments responding to real conditions and determine a favourable condition for the development of urban redevelopment interventions through the application of climate adaptive design strategies

Climate Adaptive Design Index for the Built Environment (CADI-BE): An Assessment System of the Adaptive Capacity to Urban Temperatures Increase

In a scenario in which the climate changes subject urban centres and large cities to high levels of environmental vulnerability and criticality underway, it is evident the need to define operational and straightforward decision-making tools capable of prefiguring and verifying the effectiveness of urban transformation climate-adaptive regeneration processes. The Climate Adaptive Design Index for the Built Environment (CADI-BE) tool has been developed to assess the adaptive capacity and level of performance of open urban spaces to the stresses due to the increase in global average temperatures. The repercussions of these phenomena cause the occurrence of heatwaves and the urban heat island effect (UHI), bringing out the inability of cities to cope with changes in the climate, making urban open spaces unlivable and no longer the ideal habitat for everyday life and social interactions

Direct observation of the coherent nuclear response after the absorption of a photon

How molecules convert light energy to perform a specific transformation is a fundamental question in photophysics. Ultrafast spectroscopy reveals the kinetics associated with electronic energy flow, but little is known about how absorbed photon energy drives nuclear or electronic motion. Here, we used ultrabroadband transient absorption spectroscopy to monitor coherent vibrational energy flow after photoexcitation of the retinal chromophore. In the proton pump bacteriorhodopsin we observed coherent activation of hydrogen wagging and backbone torsional modes that were replaced by unreactive coordinates in the solution environment, concomitant with a deactivation of the reactive relaxation pathway

Data Exchange Processes for the Definition of Climate-Proof Design Strategies for the Adaptation to Heatwaves in the Urban Open Spaces of Dense Italian Cities

The growing awareness of the danger of extreme weather phenomena highlights the inadequacy of current cities and the increase in their level of vulnerability concerning the impacts resulting from climate change. The theme of design to combat climate impacts requires the development of knowledge and process models capable of managing the complexity of the information necessary to direct a climate-proof transformation of the urban systems. The research made it possible to develop a methodology based on the exchange of data between GIS-based ICT tools and for parametric design, to analyze the microclimatic and performance behavior of recurrent types of urban open spaces in Italian cities, characterized by different climatic conditions, through generic urban patterns, homogeneous in terms of building density and morphology. The goal achieved was to define the critical aspects of urban open spaces with the performance offered in response to the phenomenon of heatwaves, to verify and measure the performance effectiveness of climate-proof intervention categories, to transfer these results in the form of database, hazard maps, and potential levels of adaptation, and to define guidelines for the climate-oriented project. The transfer of the project data took place through a decision support webGIS platform (SDSS)

The impact of climate change on local water management strategies. Learning from Rotterdam and Copenhagen

Cities around the world, as highly anthropized areas, are negatively suffering the impact of climate change. The awareness of intergovernmental and national institutions, has allowed the development in recent decades of policies and strategies for the reduction of climate-changing gas emissions in the environment, through the implementation of adaptation and mitigation actions, in order to implement local actions aimed at managing the different problems arising from the effects of climate change in the cities. The characteristics of the urban environment amplify the effects of climate change, sometimes with disastrous consequences, especially on people. Among the phenomena that have most direct effects on the population, extreme rainfall and pluvial flooding put the safety of people at risk. Water management has thus become one of the most addressed topics in local adaptation policies and strategies. The objective is to investigate policies, strategies and plans for adapting to climate change by the cities of Copenhagen and Rotterdam, in order to understand the implementation processes and identify environmental climate adaptive design actions as best practices to be replicated in others urban contexts relating to the water management issues, to define an urban system of spreaded actions on the surface of cities to make them climate proof