Study: RESCCUE based expert study for Barcelona
The RESCCUE project (RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas, www.resccue.eu) was born in May 2016. It was Europe’s first large-scale innovation and urban resilience project, aimed at improving the capability of cities to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multihazard threats, with minimum damage.
The RESCCUE approach turned a new page by leaving sectorial approaches behind, by considering cities as networks of interdependent systems. The four-year project went beyond the conventional analysis of the impacts of climate change on single critical infrastructures, such as energy, water or transportation. RESCCUE’s perspective was a holistic one, focusing on interconnections rather than on separate city units of the urban infrastructure networks.
The objective of RESCCUE was to produce a set of models and tools to analyse urban resilience based on a multisectoral approach, to overcome current difficulties related to a lack of information integration of the different urban services. To interconnect sectoral models, the project takes advantage of the RESCCUE tools and methodologies as the basis of further software developments able to perform the assessment, management and planning of urban resilience in an integrated way.
The three cities included as pilot sites (Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol) were the validation platforms of the RESCCUE tool, where integrated analyses of urban resilience were performed throughout the project.
The resilience roadmap for these cities, in the form of a Resilience Action Plan (RAP), was one of the key results of the project. Produced at the very end, each presented the strategic lines on which the city must focus, considering also the concrete measures that will be applied to solve specific problems. Nonetheless, these results not only aim at providing an overview of the resilience building in Barcelona, Bristol and Lisbon, but are intended to help many other cities around the world build their capacity to adapt to current and future shocks and stresses.
Taking advantage of the Clarity CSIS platform, some of the RESCCUE results can be seen in the following sections, presenting the main maps for Barcelona with regards to Hazard, Vulnerability and Risks in the city:
Study Summary
Advanced Screening: Urban Infrastructure
This study type provides a screening service to estimate the impact of heat and flooding on the fly. Work is currently underway to incorporate the effects of implementing the adaptation options.
The “advanced screening service for urban infrastructure” merges information about climate change derived from climate models (temperature or precipitation changes) with other openly available data (land use, topography, population) to obtain information about the hazard at the urban scale and to derive impact estimates. For this purpose, a variety of land use data sets (Urban Atlas, European Settlement Map, Street Tree layer) were combined and processed to refine the land use information. The European digital elevation model, the European streams and the European basins data sets were further processed to enable the delineation of a proxy for pluvial flooding.
Note: Estimations of the hazard at local scale and of the impact are based on models which have been simplified so that on the fly calculations for any location within Europe can be provided. Accordingly, these results represent a first approximation and should be used as guidance for the situation. If more precise calculations or more detailed studies (e.g. microclimate studies, wind field analyses) are desired, then it is highly recommended to perform an EXPERT STUDY*1. The marketplace*2 can be used to help find relevant partners or service providers for such an expert study.
The advanced screening service is available for cities contained in:
- Urban Atlas 2012 from Copernicus*3
- European Settlement Map from Copernicus*3
- Street Tree Layer from Copernicus*3
- Digital elevation model (EU-DEM v1.1) from Copernicus*3
- Streams from USGS HydroSHEDS*4
- Basins from Copernicus*3
- Population data from Eurostat*6
A basic screening can be performed for cities which do not have all of the above listed data sets.
*1 Study carried out by an expert using more complex approaches and additional (e.g. higher resolution) input data
*2 https://myclimateservices.eu/en
*4 https://hydrosheds.cr.usgs.gov/datadownload.php?reqdata=30accg
EMIKAT screening calculations
EMIKAT, a software tool from the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), is used to perform the following calculations on the fly:
- Estimation of hazard indices at finer scale
- Extracting information about the population distribution from Eurostat
- Heat impact on population
- Proxy for pluvial flooding (in progress)
- Impact of adaptation options (in progress)
Study steps:
- Hazards
- Hazard - Local Effects
- Exposure
- Vulnerability
- Risk/Impact
- Adaptation Options Identification
- AO Appraisal
- AO Implementation (test)
Study area
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