CURE: Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe

Project details

Full project title: CURE (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe)

Duration: 1 January 2020-31 December 2022

Funder: European Commission - Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action

Project Leader for SPE: David Ludlow

Other UWE Bristol researcher: Dr Zaheer Khan

Research partners/collaborators:

• Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH)
• Deutsches Zentrum für Luft - und Raumfahrt (DLR)
• Institute of Applied Economics Aps (ApHER)
• Geoville Informationssysteme und Datenverarbeutung GMBH (GEOVILLE)
• Gisat S.R.O. (GISAT)
• Fundacion Tecnalia Research & Innovation (TECNALIA)
• Potsdam Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung (PIK)
• Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek N.V. (VITO)
• Universitaet Basel (UNIBAS)

Project summary

Climate mitigation and adaptation actions that enhance the resilience of cities must be based on a sound understanding and quantification of the drivers of urban transformation and climate change, to make the policy objectives defined in the Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the EU New Urban Agenda (UN 2015, 2017). The main goal of CURE is to demonstrate the potential of Copernicus to provide valuable information for urban resilience, supported by third-party data and in-situ observations, as appropriate.

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. Copernicus satellite derived smart city solutions can provide the tools necessary to meet the challenges of facing European and global cities in the delivery of sustainable development and carbon neutral cities.

CURE provides the catalyst to develop the necessary new cross-cutting EO derived intelligence integrating existing land, atmosphere, climate change and emergency management services, according to city requirements for integrated assessment driving and defining carbon neutral solutions.

Project aims

• to provide a proof-of-concept that urban planning and management activities towards enhancing the resilience of cities in Europe can be supported by Copernicus Core Services, by developing cross-cutting applications focusing on climate change adaptation and mitigation; energy and economy; and healthy cities and social environments, which will combine the outcome from multiple Core Services with third-party data
• to improve EO-based methods to estimate the urban environmental parameters at local and city scales, needed by the above cross-cutting applications, specifying and analysing also the associated uncertainties and evaluating them using in-situ observations
• to organise workshops for users from several cities to gather their needs and demonstrate the technical operational feasibility of the developed cross cutting applications and to exploit users’ feedback to improve applications’ performance
• to provide a benchmarked selection of concurring methodological approaches used to build the cross-cutting applications
• to develop scenarios on how CURE could potentially be integrated into the existing Copernicus service architecture, addressing also its economic feasibility
• to support sustainable urban planning strategies relevant to climate change mitigation and adaptation in cities towards enhancing urban resilience in Europe.

Project contact

For further information on the project, please contact Associate Professor David Ludlow.