European Workshop on Urban Climate Indicators, EWUCI 2021

17 May 2021 (Paris, France)

The European Workshop on Urban Climate Indicators tackles the design of relevant and computable urban climate indicators to study and adapt to climate change, specifically indicators that can be scaled in space and in time throughout Europe thanks to a better access to and better sharing of data.

Context and objectives

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls for Climate Services to transfer more actively to all stakeholders climate change information that is scientifically robust and relevant to their specific context. Designing these services requires collaboration between scientists from different background and practitioners, between public and private sector. We are challenged to advance the field of urban climate indicator and to make the most of opportunities that exist at the scale of Europe, like information infrastructures (Copernicus, INSPIRE), the European directive on Open Data and the ambition of Europe to become the first neutral continent.

In this context, the European Workshop on Urban Climate Indicators tackles the design of relevant and computable urban climate indicators to study and adapt to climate change, specifically indicators that can be scaled in space and in time throughout Europe thanks to a better access to and better sharing of data.  It is organised with the support of EuroSDR, of the national mapping agencies, statistical institutes and meteorological institutes of France and of Finland (IGN, INSEE, MétéoFrance, Statistics Finland, FMI, NLS), of the finnish environment institute (SYKE) and of the european project ERA4CS URCLIM on urban climate services.

Target audience

Targeted audience is scientists and experts who specify, prototype or produce indicators relevant to urban climate study, scientists and experts who advance the field of information infrastructure to support this application. 

Venue: The workshop will be fully virtual due to the current sanitary situation, using zoom. 

Duration: 1 full day, May 17th, 2021

Register to the event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ewuci-2021-tickets-148888376141 

Program May 17th, 2021 (09:00 to 17:00)

9:00

Welcome adress 

What data to manage summer comfort in urban planing projects in France?

Julia Hidalgo, LISST (Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Society Solidarity and Territory)

Designing solutions for municipalities specific needs related to adapting to UHI 

Christophe Bortolaso, Berger-Levrault

Cities and buildings now have real digital twins that are increasingly precise in their geometric and/or semantic representations. It is now possible to build 2D or 3D, multi-layered and multi-scale representations of a city thanks to the data that play an increasing role in understanding the city and its evolution.

These representations or digital twins can be augmented with a wide variety of information from many sources. This allows to observe a wide range of phenomena while offering the possibility to visualize them geospatially. For example, many cities have invested the possibilities offered by IOT and open data to collect and make available diverse data sources such as energy consumption of public buildings, green spaces, humidity levels, age and population density, tree planting, wind strength and direction, flowering cities & villages labels, urban mobility, public spending, transportation networks, frailty of the elderly, CO2 emissions, noise, etc. 

These data lakes make it possible to build powerful analytical tools to help manage the city, particularly in terms of urban planning and environmental policy. By combining all these sources, we can create a window on the city, offering an opportunity to understand the interactions between different phenomena. For example, it becomes possible to correlate vegetation density, urban mobility, and public finances with strong environmental requirements such as the reduction of urban heat islands. It is then possible to consider and design a "systemic" approach to the city. 

Decision-makers, scientists and urban planning agencies are taking advantage of these digital tools to support their decision-making processes. However, citizens are still very little involved while it is their behavior that offers the greatest opportunities to limit thermal stress in cities. It is therefore essential to develop an opened observatory of the urban environment built on state-of-the art data-visualization to provide simple representations understandable by all, and a complete data-platform enabling artificial intelligence and climate models to enrich the disjointed data sources and assist public environmental policies.

10:15

Break 

10:45

Co-construction of Climate Services based on a meteorological stations monitoring network in Toulouse agglomeration 

Guillaume Dumas, CNRM, Toulouse Métropole

Using Satellite Data for Urban Environmental Measures

Maren Koehlmann, Institute for Research and Development in Federal Statistics

This presentation showcases the necessity and possible ways of acquisition of objective and reliable data in the light of democratic decision making. With certain topics in the political and social debate, new needs for reliable data are growing. This practical contribution discusses which mandate statistical offices might have to provide relevant and timely data. In the case of environmental and urban indicators satellite imagery could be used to provide statistics without any burden of respondents.

New air quality measurement service for cities 

Tarek Habib , Murmuration, https://murmuration-sas.com/en/homepage

Continuous monitoring of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) is of vital importance as it is key to measure our progress towards the achievement of the sustainability of our environment. The same applies to global atmospheric simulation of GHGs variations and fluxes that enables us to understand and build the future climatic scenarios. Both tasks are complex requiring high computational costs, human validation work and a large number of geographically distributed measurement instruments. The space agencies ESA and NASA have developed in the last decade satellites capable of measuring air quality, through the observation of GHGs, with increased accuracy. Satellites are capable of measuring the concentration of GHGs in the troposphere.

We propose to present our findings in computing the correlation between ground-based data using the ICOS infrastructure data with OCO2 and S5P satellite data to validate the use of satellites to improve our global observation capacity and the global simulation models of GHGs. On the other hand, we will present the possibility of creating a monitoring service for cities, scalable on a global scale and its economic model.

12:15 - 14:00

Lunch break

14:00

Urban climate and adaptation : from local to European scales, back and forth

Alban Mallet, Ecological transition department, Greater Nantes Metropolitan Area

This presentation tackles encountered challenges from the perspective of an operational practioner to adapt a city to climate change. At the local scale, the transfer of knowledge from scientific requires more interoperability and common referentials. At a higher scale, territories gather to compile and consolidate observations and knowledge in so-called regional IPCC. At a european scale, collaboration betwen cities, in Eurocities, also is important to participate to the european regulation process. 

Contribution on assessing methodological approaches for SDG indicator analysis 

Gwendolin Seidner-Schötz, Patrick Knoefel, and Jeanette Kretz  

BKG, German federal agency for cartography and geodesy

Overview on selected challenges through the lens of ERA4CS URCLIM project and other projects 

Athanasios Votsis, Adriaan Perrels, Valéry Masson

University of Twente, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Météo France

  • Designing urban adaptation indicators  (C3)
  • Revising urban concepts and definitions used in Europe for urban climate studies  (C2)
  • Adding environmental indicators to the European Grid LAEA (C1)

Round table 

animated by Adriaan Perrels, Finnish Meteorological Institute

16:30

End of the workshop