Facing climate change impact with clever solutions: the Harmonia project

Urban areas are particularly?vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As the share of the world population living in cities continues to increase, so will worsenthe impact on the climate and its detrimental effects on the wellbeing of citizens. This gravening situation?calls for more resilient?environments and urban development strategies, so HARMONIA it's a project to provide tools to predict Climate Change effects.

Resilience Guard is part of the team developing a support system to improve resilience and create sustainable urban areas able to cope with climate change and extreme weather events.

We have been appointed to lead three vital project tasks.

1. The first involves the selection and documentation of the appropriate standards to use for the risk metrics evaluation and the impact assessment methodology, in line with ISO standards.
2. The second task is relevant to the vulnerability assessment and aims to increase the resilience of urban environments against foreseen or unforeseen incidents/crises, as well as climate impacts, by using a vulnerability and risk-based approach.
3. The third task addresses multi-hazard mitigation and adaptation measures through the design and implementation of a decision support system based on a holistic planning process, considering a number of community goals related to HARMONIA's vulnerability assessment and risk management approach.

According to Eurostat, about 75% of European citizens already inhabit urban areas. This means urban resilience is of paramount importance. Cities are taking steps to become more resilient to protect their residents and assets, but also to remain functional during crises. These efforts are supported by global agreements and local policies or regulations on climate change.

However, currently there is no dedicated process to understand and quantify CC effects on urban areas using satellite and auxiliary data. Consequently, urban development strategies regarding CC are very limited.

HARMONIA aims to bridge this gap through a holistic decision support system to quantitatively and qualitatively assess climatic parameters that directly affect European cities and citizens. Delivery of this data, information and knowledge will provide invaluable support to governmental bodies and municipality authorities to properly adapt their short- and long-term policies towards deploying sustainable and resilient masterplans/programs and providing efficient damage prevention and mitigation, in addition to rectifying damage that has already been inflicted on the built environment and infrastructure. This data will additionally provide complementary support to citizens and investors (real estate, investment banks, insurance companies etc) and promote the economic growth and sustainable development of cities.

More detailed information and news regarding the HARMONIA project can be found on the project's website:?https://harmonia-project.eu