The recently concluded H2020 project CURE prepared the ground for exploitation of Copernicus Core Services in urban planning. Achieving climate neutrality requires a city that has joint the EU Mission on “Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities” (the Cities Mission), to reduce the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions from all sectors within the city’s boundary to net zero by 2030, including emissions within the city boundary, from: combustion of fossil fuels in buildings and facilities; combustion of fossil fuels for all vehicles and transport; and changes in land use (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). All the above are considered as Scope 1 GHG emissions (direct emissions) and the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), based on the CURE method for CO2 emissions monitoring, holds promise in aiding cities to achieve the ambitious goals of the Mission, by assisting in monitoring the efficiency of efforts to trace the advancement towards climate neutrality. The proposed project CLMS-Cities (Copernicus responding to EU Cities Mission) aims to improve CLMS with new elements and products, capable of being integrated into land planning decisions with regard to climate change mitigation at local scale. CLMS-Cities will contribute to CLMS evolution, as it is expected to lead to more evidence-based urban planning activities related to climate change mitigation, resulting in improved GHG emissions inventory methods and outputs to support cities to meet the Mission’s ambitious objectives. It will focus on the ten cities of the Mission that were recently (2023) labelled, providing the Mission’s community with spatially disaggregated environmental intelligence at a local scale and a proof-of-concept that urban planning and management strategies enhancing the GHG inventories can be supported by CLMS. CLMS-Cities method will be modular and scalable, delivering consistent products across the cities of the Mission and developing synergies between CLMS and third-party data sources.

TEMA will greatly improve Natural Disaster Management (NDM, e.g., for wildfires, floods) by automating precise semantic 3D mapping and disaster evolution prediction to achieve NDM goals in near-real-time. It will analyze and fuse many heterogeneous extreme data sources: smart drone and in-situ sensors, remote sensing data, topographical data, meteorological data/predictions and geosocial media data (text, image and videos). TEMA will focus on the extreme nature of the data, due to their varying resolution and quality, very large volume and update rate, different spatiotemporal resolutions and acquisition frequencies, real-time needs and multilingualism. It will develop an integrated, ground-breaking NDM platform, focusing on real-time semantic extraction from multiple heterogeneous data modalities and sources, on-the-fly construction of a meaningful semantically annotated 3D disaster area map, prediction of disaster evolution and improved communication between service providers and end-users, through automated process triggering and response recommendations. Semantic analysis computations will be distributed across the edge-to-cloud continuum, in a federated manner, to minimize latency. Extreme data analytics will be performed in a trustworthy and transparent way, by greatly advancing state-of-the-art AI and XAI approaches. The constantly updated 3D map and the disaster evolution predictions will form the basis for an advanced, interactive, Extended Reality (XR) interface, where the current situation will be visualized and different response strategies will be dynamically evaluated through simulation by NDM personnel. The innovative, scalable and efficient TEMA platform will provide precise NDM support, based on extreme data analytics. It will be validated on two critical disaster use-cases (wildfires and floods), in four EU countries, and will form the basis for the TEMA NDM-Analytics-as-a Service (NDM-AaaS) model.

The Med-IREN project aims to provide actionable demonstration on how to climate proof the Mediterranean critical infrastructures, across critical sectors, by introducing NBS both in terms of improving climate risk management and sustaining their business continuity to extreme climate change. The project will be showcased in five lighthouse regions across the Mediterranean, each corresponding to a present day challenge, that are aligned with regional policies and can constitute the EU as a global leader in the field. Med-IREN will cover different and diverse types of CI (energy, transport, water, ICT, social) , priority climate hazards within the Mediterranean, which is a climate hot-spot, and NBS interventions. In parallel, the interventions and solutions will be replicated into four more regions across the EU, covering the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Boreal regions. Med-IREN will also provide evidence how key enabling conditions, such as participatory governance and citizen engagement, novel forms of financing, innovative urban/landscape planning and capacity building will support regional systemic transformation nd provide the upscaling and replication mechanism within Mediterranean regions and beyond. A high-end digital decision making support toolset will be developed, integrating data from multiple sources, both in-situ and E.O., applying state-of-the-science models, as well as providing unprecedented visualization and sensemaking capabilities for understanding and quantifying resilience through-out the infrastructure and NBS life-cycle. Med-IREN will rely on the integration of the research output of more than 15 European and National projects, that focused on the (climate) resilience of infrastructures, regional adaptation and implementation of NBS. Med-IREN is conceived as a powerful showcase of the EU twin green & digital transition and an immediate success story of the EU Green Deal.

URBREATH vision is to develop, implement, demonstrate, validate and replicate a comprehensive, community participation and NBS-driven urban revitalisation, resilience and climate neutrality paradigm that will ultimately radically enhance the social interactions, inclusion, equitability and liveability in cities. Specifically, the aim of the URBREATH project is to implement hybrid/Natural Base Solutions putting at the heart of the decision-making process the communities within a city. Advanced techniques, particularly Local Digital Twins and AI, and social innovation will facilitate the achievement of its vision. The project will have four phases: 1. Inception, 2. Development, 3. Piloting, 4. Transition. The preliminary results of a single Phase are evaluated within the following Phase so to allow for feedback before releasing the final version. The Inception phase will define the methodology to be followed for the project development and will deliver the project functional and technical requirements. The second phase will release the URBREATH technical framework, consisting of tools to manage the whole data value chain and to support end-users to collaborate on the design and creation of NBS to be used in the city/district. It will be used to monitor and take decisions on the NBS to be implemented/deployed in the Piloting phase (evidence-based decision making), that involves 4 Front Runner Cities in 4 different climatic zones: Cluj-Napoca (RO - Continental), Leuven (BE – Atlantic), Madrid (ES – Mediterranean), and Tallin (EE – Boreal). During the Transition phase, all the information, results and lessons learnt from the previous steps will be collected and analysed to provide recommendations and foster replication activities and the uptake of project outputs at the end of its lifespan. To this aim, 5 Follower Cities are involved: Aarhus (DK), Athens (EL), Kajaani (FI), Parma (IT), Pilsen (CZ), linked to the Front Runners for climatic zone and/or dimension.