Feb
19
2025
By dstratakos
Cospace

The COSPACE Group is hosting a joint webinar, bringing together two Horizon Europe-funded projects, BUILDSPACE and 100KTREEs, to discuss innovative solutions for enhancing urban sustainability and resilience. 

Event Details: 

 

Innovative Urban Spaces: The BUILDSPACE approach 

At the heart of the BUILDSPACE project lies a commitment to empowering stakeholders with the tools and insights needed to make data-driven, sustainable decisions to monitor the energy performance of buildings and develop strategies for the sustainability and resilience of cities against the risks posed by climate change, with an emphasis on the analysis of the urban thermal environment and flooding. 

The project offers five decision support tools through a core platform which integrates diverse data sources, and advanced analytics. Drones and satellite data are integrated to improve building energy efficiency and climate resilience, as well as advanced technology is used to help cities better prepare for the impacts of climate change. These tools are divided into building-level and city-level categories, and they will be tested in pilots in four EU countries: Poland, Latvia, Greece and Slovenia. 

Services (SE) at building level: 

  • SE1. Digital Twin Generation creates detailed 3D digital twins of buildings using locally sourced data, integrating methods to detect and classify building elements. 

  • SE2. Digital Twins Enrichment integrates thermal imagery from drones and AI-driven analysis to enhance digital twins with critical data on building envelopes. 

Services (SE) at city level: 

  • SE3. Building Environment Climate Scenarios estimates current and future building energy demand under different climate scenarios while promoting retrofitting strategies and solar PV deployment. 

  • SE4. Urban Heat Analysis and Resilience analyses urban heat islands with high-resolution data and combines demographics to assess urban heat risk and social vulnerability. 

  • SE4. Urban Flood Resilience predicts and visualises flood risks and damages under different climate scenarios, supporting cities in planning retrofits and blue-green infrastructures for flood resilience. 

 

Greening Cities with 100KTREEs

The 100KTREEs project aims to make cities a better and healthier place to live by encouraging municipalities to plant more trees not only for reasons of CO2 reduction but also as a means of heat highlands mitigation, urban flood reduction, noise abatement and cooling of buildings. To this end, the initiative provides a decision support system to improve air quality, biodiversity, human well-being and reduce climate risks by increasing tree cover in urban areas. By leveraging Copernicus satellite data and in-situ information, including data collected by a Citizen Science Application, 100KTREEs helps cities: 

  • Map existing tree cover and identify opportunities for planting. 

  • Assess the ecological and economic value of urban trees. 

  • Model the impact of additional greenery on factors like air quality, urban cooling, noise reduction, and biodiversity. 

By assigning monetary evaluation of the key ecosystem services of a tree, e.g. pollution absorption, cooling effect, noise abatement, flood risk reduction and increased biodiversity, a number of business cases will be developed for two partner cities. Sofia (Bulgaria) and Copenhagen (Denmark) are the two metropolitan use cases where the technical and socio-economic approach of 100KTREEs will be tested and demonstrated. The city of Sofia will be supported by the project in implementing new urban green areas and in tackling the problems of air pollution, while the city of Copenhagen is currently implementing a viable tree strategy with the aim of increasing the number of urban trees. 

100KTREEs will provide assessments for planting trees in cities on an ad-hoc basis. The approach will be a combination of cost-benefit analysis enhanced with qualitative indicators to demonstrate the societal and environmental benefits of tree planting. The initiative will support cities in the development of innovative business models and collaborative investment/sponsorship schemes, where private companies collaborate with city administrations to achieve a common goal of financing tree planting. 

While BUILDSPACE and 100KTREEs tackle urban sustainability from different angles, their missions are deeply intertwined. BUILDSPACE’s emphasis on data-driven urban planning aligns seamlessly with 100KTREE’s focus on Nature-based Solutions. Together, they offer a holistic framework for cities seeking to balance technological innovation with ecological preservation. 

Join us during the webinar to discuss the emerging innovative solutions for enhancing urban sustainability and resilience. 

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