Heat stress planning for cities to help climate change preparedness
Urbanisation poses different societal challenges, among which also heat stress. Urban heat stress occurs when overly populated parts of a city get extremely heated what can result in stress, illness or even death among the people living there. To adequately address such heat-related issues, cities need to be able to quickly access, process and manage various climate data.
Within Horizon 2020 Climate-fit.city, we developed a web-based platform that allows cities to measure and assess key properties of the urban environment. With our Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP), cities can also monitor changes in terms of population distribution over a long period of time. It allows users to effectively utilise Earth Observation (EO) imagery, statistics and geo-data, for example.
To develop Urban TEP in a way that can benefit cities best, we worked with a network of users and experts. Among our network were:
- Scientists from the Group on Earth Observation
- World Bank Group
- European Environment Agency (EEA)
- European Commission (DG Regio)
- International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP)
- City of Prague