Research

As cities worldwide grapple with urgent climate challenges, it becomes imperative to not only devise robust technical and processual solutions but also to accelerate their implementation. Despite the availability of such solutions, our urban areas continue to be vulnerable to the intensifying impacts of climate change, including increasing temperatures and heavy rainfall events. This project is about the pursuit of climate-resilient urban environments, by focusing on sustainable, integrative, and cross-sectoral planning and implementation at scale, including innovative impact-based financing instruments. Thus the project is focusing on two demoareas. The first area is the neighbourhood development project “climate-boulevard” Melk, including housing and traffic routes. While the structural transformation of a parking-place into a so-called inner-city climate forest will be implemented as a demo and the corresponding impact will be monitored during the project period, a holistic cross-siloed impact planning process, impact-based financing and co-creation structures will be implemented for the whole neighbourhood area by setting up a living lab for the entire neighbourhood development. The second neighbourhood transformation is in Berlin Charlottenburg - with the demo of a completely rainwater self-sufficient street, the Ilsenburgerstraße. Through co-creative Living Labs in each Demoarea, conflicting objectives will be identified and negotiated between all relevant stakeholders, including developers, property owners, citizens, enterprises and public hand. The aim is generating scalable and transferable solutions at the whole district. To ensure long-lasting and active engagement, the living lab will be further developed to a newly to be found privately managed local company in order to activate citizen engagement at the district level by fostering open innovation via a number of cross-sectoral (planning and management-) tools, disseminating knowledge on climate measures and enabling access to financing instruments.

The municipality of Mannersdorf am Leithagebirge is currently developing a comprehensive climate strategy to achieve climate neutrality, increase sustainability and pursue the goal of increasing climate resilience. This is being accelerated by improving the microclimate with the help of blue-green infrastructure in public spaces and shady green spaces and footpaths. The establishment of a new rain management system to mitigate heavy rainfall events and promote unsealing is also a declared goal of the municipality. The renaturalisation of municipal water bodies is recognised as a contribution to flood protection. Finally, the opening/reactivation of the currently piped and underground Mühlbach stream is discussed as a key measure in connection with the aforementioned points. The most important cornerstones of the exploratory project for the demonstration of a climate-neutral neighbourhood are Climate protection by avoiding greenhouse gas emissions through the use of local environmental energy to decarbonise the operation of municipal buildings Climate resilience through the development of additional alternative water sources and more efficient use of existing resources Climate change adaptation through the creation of climate-friendly public open spaces with the help of blue-green infrastructures

The proposed project goal is to extend the development of the ET estimation service, which was already done in the ASAP project, VASE3 and Hedwig project4. In the VASE project freely available Copernicus Sentinel and other geoinformation data was used to create an evapotranspiration map for Vienna and the surrounding area, which provides information about open green spaces that exhibit particularly good evapotranspiration. The idea of the proposed service is to develop a methodology for estimating ET at the scale of 10 meters, by using an innovative machine learning data fusion to combine the data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission at 10m, with NASA ECOSTRESS mission at 70 m, resulting in a complete ET map over Austria. Sentinel-2 capabilities will be used as input and NASA ECOSTRESS mission as reference. The deep learning model will have as objective to retrieve the relationship between thermal infrared (TIR) and normalized vegetation index (NDVI) and by using additional variables estimating ET. The validation will be done by the partner project by setting up ET experiments in climate chambers and measuring ET of different plant communities throughout the year in different weather conditions to ensure the accuracy of the final product. They will also help in engaging decision-makers across the entire value chain, conducting extensive public outreach efforts, and considering the requirements of target audiences and potential stakeholders.