HARMONIA will leverage existing tools, services and novel technologies to deliver an integrated resilience assessment platform working on top of GEOSS, seeing the current lack of a dedicated process of understanding and quantifying Climate Change (CC) effects on urban areas using Satellite and auxiliary data available on GEOSS, DIAS, urban TEP, GEP etc. platforms. HARMONIA will focus on a solution for climate applications supporting adaptation and mitigation measures of the Paris Agreement. HARMONIA will test modern Remote Sensing tools and 3D-4D monitoring, Machine Learning/Deep Learning techniques and develop a modular scalable data-driven multi-layer urban areas observation information knowledge base, using Satellite data time series, spatial information and auxiliary data, in-situ observing systems, which will integrate detailed information on local level of neighborhoods/building blocks. HARMONIA focuses on two pillars: a) Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC: urban flooding, soil degradation and geo-hazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation) and b) Manmade hazards: heat islands, urban heat fluxes, Air Quality, Gas emissions. Sustainable reconstruction of urban areas and the health of humans and ecosystems, are top priorities. HARMONIA will take into account the local ecosystems of European urban areas, following an integrated and sustainable approach by incorporating the active communities’ participation initiative, which will involve the use of a social platform. Paying extra attention to Sustainable Urban Development, one of the Societal Benefit Areas posits that use of EO is a crucial tool towards resilient cities and the assessment of urban footprints, to promote equity, welfare and shared prosperity for all, feed new indicators for the monitoring of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals in an EU context.

Aviation is one of the most critical infrastructures of the 21st century. Even comparably short interruptions can cause economic damage summing up to the Billion-Euro range. As evident from the past, aviation shows certain vulnerability with regard to natural hazards. The proposal EUNADICS-AV addresses airborne hazards (environmental emergency scenarios), including volcano eruptions, nuclear accidents and emergencies and other scenarios where aerosols and certain trace gases are injected into the atmosphere. Such events are considered rare, but may have an extremely high impact, as demonstrated during the European Volcanic Ash Crisis in 2010. Before the 1990s, insufficient monitoring as well as limited data analysis capabilities made it difficult to react to and to prepare for certain rare, high-impact events. Meanwhile, there are many data available during crisis situations, and the data analysis technology has improved significantly. However, there is still a significant gap in the Europe-wide availability of real time hazard measurement and monitoring information for airborne hazards describing “what, where, how much” in 3 dimensions, combined with a near-real-time European data analysis and assimilation system. The main objective of EUNADICS-AV is to close this gap in data and information availability, enabling all stakeholders in the aviation system to obtain fast, coherent and consistent information. This would allow a seamless response on a European scale, including ATM, ATC, airline flight dispatching and individual flight planning. In the SESAR 2020 Programme Execution Framework, EUNADICS-AV is a SESAR Enabling project (project delivering SESAR Technological Solutions). The project aims at passing a SESAR maturity level V2, which includes respective service validation activities, including validation exercises. Work will be also done to prepare a full V3 validation.

The overall goal of AIRCOAT is to make European waterborne transport more energy efficient and less polluting by developing a disruptive hull coating that reduces the frictional resistance of ships. The AIRCOAT project will enhance a passive air lubrication technology that utilises the biomimetic Salvinia effect. This effect enables trapping air through combination of a hydrophobic micro-structured surface with hydrophilic pins. The project will technologically implement this effect on a self-adhesive foil system. Applying a ship with such an AIRCOAT foil will produce a thin permanent air layer, which reduces the overall frictional resistance while acting as a physical barrier between water and hull surface. Besides substantially reducing main engine fuel oil consumption and hence exhaust gas emission, the air barrier further inhibits the attachment of fouling, the release of biocide substances (of underlying coatings) to the water and mitigates the radiation of ship noise. As a refit technology, it is immediately applicable to the whole fleet, is independent of the fuel type and can be combined with other efficiency improving technologies. Consequently, the technology creates both an economical and an environmental benefit. The interdisciplinary AIRCOAT consortium will develop small-scale prototypes to optimise the surface characteristics of this new technology supported by experimental and numerical methods. AIRCOAT will further produce large-scale pilots to demonstrate the efficiency and industrial feasibility in operational environments (laboratory, research ships and container ship). Finally, the project will perform a full-scale validation process to boost the technology towards market readiness. The AIRCOAT project will demonstrate the high potential of this game-changing technology to revolutionise the maritime coating sector and to become a ground-breaking future energy efficiency and emission reduction technology.