Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe

The Remote Sensing Lab of FORTH focuses on EO and its area of research is the study of environmental phenomena and problems in urban and natural environments. FORTH is the CURE Coordinator and is leading the work related to the development of the CURE cross-cutting component applications. FORTH is also contributing to the CURE System development, participates in the urban service analysis and assists the effort of scenarios development and benchmarking. FORTH has a wealth of data for the city of Heraklion to contribute in CURE and an established collaboration with the local authorities in Heraklion, participating as potential users of the CURE prototype.

DLR is Germany's national research center for aeronautics and space. In the framework of CURE, main tasks of DLR include:
i) leading the project framework set-up and interacting with the cities stakeholders;
ii) leading the development of the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) assessment application as a tool to effectively support the potential heat risk evaluation;
iii) supporting the Nature-Based Solution application by the automatic identification of actual and potential green roofs;
iv) supporting the organization of the different user’s and demonstration workshops throughout the project.

UWE Bristol is one of the leading public sector institutes in the South-West region of the United Kingdom for research and education in the fields of environment and technology. In CURE project, UWE is leading the stakeholder interfacing to ensure that the conceptual design of the CURE cross-cutting applications meet the real needs of the practitioners and end users communities. In particular, UWE is involved in:
i) organizing and managing the stakeholder engagement through dialogue workshops and surveys,
ii) gathering and managing the user oriented requirements for cross-cutting applications,
iii) supporting the cross-cutting applications development, and
iv) leading the demonstration and evaluation of cross-cutting applications through workshops and dialogues with stakeholders.

CWare is an independent research and consultancy SME conducting economic research and providing strategic consulting services within Economics, Circular/Green Economy, Urban Resilience, Sustainable Development, Resource Efficiency, Life Cycle Analysis and Life Cycle Costing. CWare is a spin-off from ApHER ApS, involved in a number of EU research projects and part of the BLOXHUB (Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization). The strong profile and broad expertise in socio-economic assessment makes CWare a solid partner for the Health Impacts Application. Furthermore, CWare is well suited to lead the activities on exploitation, including suitability and economic assessment of possible scenarios for upscaling the CURE System.

GeoVille is an internationally operating company, providing consultancy, services and products related to remote sensing, geoinformation and geographic information systems and has longstanding experience in the field of land and environmental monitoring, focusing on urban planning and management support. GeoVille has long term experience in the set-up and implementation of operational Copernicus Services, specifically in the frame of CLMS and is leading the work of the CURE System development and participates in developing of the future scenario/architecture roadmap of CURE.

The company mission is to provide its clients with wide range of value added, complete, high quality, affordable and ‘state-of-the-art’ geoinformation services based on the Earth Observation technology. GISAT brings to its domestic and international clients complete portfolio of services starting from satellite data and geomatics software distribution, through specialized image and GIS data processing and analysis, up to advanced geoinformation products and services. GISAT leads the Copernicus Core Services Interface with CURE, develops the relevant data portfolio, develops on the even CURE applications and participates in the development of the CURE System.

TECNALIA’s Urban Ecosystem Scope of Action, which includes the Building Technologies and Energy & Environment Divisions, focuses on cities as drivers of sustainable development and innovation catalysts in digitalization, urban planning, energy efficiency, mobility, climate change adaptation and health & wellbeing. TECNALIA contributes to CURE System with the NBS application, specifically addressing green roofs potential and related effectiveness for temperature and water runoff regulation. TECNALIA is leading the benchmarking analysis, identifying competitive advantages of CURE System and also articulates activities with Vitoria-Gasteiz, contributing to user’s requirements assessment through the established collaboration with the Municipality, as well as with the Climate-KIC.

The *Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research* (PIK), founded in 1992, is a non-profit research institute addressing crucial scientific questions in the fields of global change, climate impacts and sustainable development. Researchers in the natural and social sciences from all over the world work closely together to examine the earth system‘s capacity for withstanding human interventions and devise options for a sustainable development of humankind and nature; bringing together the concepts of global commons and of planetary boundaries are key in this interdisciplinary endeavour. PIK plays an active role in scientific consultancy through involvement in national and international bodies such as the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the World Bank or the Asia Development Bank. In the last years, the “Global Go To Think Tank Index Report” ranked PIK among the world's top think tanks working on environmental policy – in 2018 PIK was awarded as number one. As one of the core academic partners in Climate-KIC (Knowledge and Innovation Community), an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), PIK is in continuous exchange with the business community. In CURE PIK provides pivotal in-depth knowledge about Urban Transformation challenges to the consortium.

In the CURE project, VITO is responsible for the Urban Air Quality and Urban Thermal Comfort applications, providing street-level maps of relevant indicators based on state-of-the-art high resolution models. Copernicus remote sensing and atmospheric model data will be used as input sources for VITO’s model chains, which will focus on a number of selected European cities. Besides validation exercises, the models allow the assessment of adaptation measures to improve the local situation. The Urban Thermal Comfort application will be developed into an online tool, which will allow users to assess the effectiveness of their own scenarios.

The group of Meteorology, Climatology and Remote sensing (MCR) of the Atmospheric Sciences Research Group of the University of Basel (UNIBAS) investigates climatological and micrometeorological processes by combining in-situ measurements (e.g. from flux towers) and Earth Observation data. UNIBAS operates flux towers in the city center of Basel since more than 20 years. Within CURE, UNIBAS is responsible and will develop two applications: The Urban Heat Emissions Monitoring and the Urban CO2 Emissions Monitoring.