KLIMASCANNER: An AI-Powered QGIS Plugin for Climate-Resilient Urban Planning

Urban areas are particularly affected by climate change due to continuing urban development and an increased occurrence of extreme weather events like heat waves that lead to increasing heat stress on urban population. Furthermore, the occurrence of heavy rain events and dry periods are expected to rise, posing additional challenges to cities because sealed surfaces inhibit the infiltration of water into the soil and thus increase storm water runoff and reduce the water availability for plants. The project GreenAdaptation, funded by the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP), examines crucial steps necessary to support climate change adaptation and to develop urban planning recommendation and climate analysis maps for cities and municipalities, as they provide an important tool to support urban planners and local administrations towards decision making and to facilitate future urban planning processes. Urban climate analyses represent an essential component in the development of urban planning recommendation maps. Here, we focus on already existing climatological datasets as well as urban climate modelling tools. To gather pre-existing knowledge regarding temperature and precipitation change, a set of climate indices with respect to heat, heavy rainfall and drought are selected together with practitioners implementing adaptation measures. The climate indices are calculated using available observational datasets from the Austrian semi-automatic meteorological station network (TAWES) and Austrian climate scenarios (OEKS15) to assess the past and indicate future development for the chosen municipality. Urban climate simulations carried out by the urban climate model MUKLIMO_3, developed by DWD (German Meteorological Service), are used to analyze overheating and to identify areas particularly affected by heat, taking into account city-specific structures and land use information, as well as meteorological conditions. Furthermore, a digital elevation model is analyzed to identify areas potentially prone to flooding. Merging the derived maps will indicate critical zones prone to extreme weather impacts, but also areas with a high synergy potential for climate adaptation. The methodological framework for the consolidation and integration of the analyses into urban planning recommendation maps will be demonstrated and results of the urban climate analysis will be shown for the Municipality of Perchtoldsdorf, Lower Austria.

One performance of the ecological environment deterioration is that city is further and further away from the climate comfort. With the outstanding issues of urban heat island effect, climate un-livability has become one of the obstacles in building sustainable urban livable environment. Chinese urban planning at this stage should attach great importance to protect and restore human settlements, especially the space environment of urban and rural ecosystems, while creating urban health and comfortable space environment. As a leading of urban construction, urban planning should make use of the existing climatic conditions to create urban livable environment. Promoting ecological, livable and sustainable development will have real significance in trying to solve urban climate problems. This paper points out that urban planning should be an additional climate special planning, which include: analysis of local climatic conditions, urban climatic suitability assessment and neighborhood micro-climate suitability for livable environment division, this paper also points out that urban climate special planning should combine with industrial layout, road system planning, open space system planning to create livable environment with local climate adaptation.

How relevant are local climate zones and urban climate zones for urban climate research? Dijon (France) as a case study

Problems caused by urban climate phenomena such as urban heat island intensification, nuisance winds, or the lack of ventilation, are a growing concern with urban population growth and aging infrastructure. While many possible solutions are known, effective adaptation strategies have been insufficiently implemented to ameliorate urban climate problems. Reasons for this ‘implementation gap’ such as the level of awareness about implementable solutions have received little attention in the literature. An important question thus remains unanswered: what do different urban actors (citizens; politicians; urban planners and designers; and urban climate experts) who shape the urban environment and thus its climate, know about urban climate adaptation measures? We conducted a pilot study using semi-structured interviews with specialists in the field of urban sustainability related to urban planning and climate in ten countries worldwide. Interview results indicated that awareness of adaptation measures differs between countries, but even more so between different actor groups. Citizens and politicians are less aware than urban planners or designers and urban climate experts. Awareness raising should involve media campaigns, further education and display of good practice. Politicians should work on better laws and their enforcement and urban climate experts on good knowledge communication.

Urban growth and climate change are 2 of the main challenges worldwide [20]. Cities are growing rapidly while average temperatures are rising, and extreme weather conditions, as heavy rain events, are becoming more frequently. Soon 4 out of 5 EU citizens are living in cities [6]. The results are increasing costs for health expenses and infrastructure damages. Urban planning processes have to consider future climate conditions and the impact on people, buildings and the urban environment. Until today there was no simple solution to measure and calculate the climate impacts of urban developments. GREENPASS® is a technological breakthrough, the world’s first software-based technology for climate-resilient and resource-efficient urban development. After 9 years of scientific research and development the technology can easily be used by urban planners as architects and be integrated into existing urban planning workflows and processes.With GREENPASS® the impact of buildings, materials and plants on urban climate become measurable and comparable in a standardized way – powered by ENVI-met®. It supports optimization of investments towards effects of Green Infrastructure (trees, green roofs and walls, …) such as cooling, thermal comfort, water retention and carbon sequestration. GREENPASS® allows to identify the optimal solution for any urban development. Supported projects receive finally a GREENPASS® certificate on their overall performance. The technology has already been applied successfully for more than 25 projects within Austria and Europe [3] and will be explained more in detail using the case study of ‘FLAIR in the City’ - the world’s first GREENPASS® Gold-certified residential building, located in Vienna/Austria.

As climate change intensifies, urban areas are increasingly exposed to more frequent, severe and longer-lasting temperature extremes, particularly heatwaves. This growing thermal amplitude represents a major challenge for highly urbanised and ageing societies, with direct consequences for public health, energy systems and social equity. Cities are especially vulnerable due to the Urban Heat Island effect, whereby land cover characteristics, urban morphology and reduced vegetation cover amplify thermal stress. Despite this vulnerability, effective local adaptation remains constrained by the limited availability of high-resolution operational air temperature data, to support early warning systems, urban planning, and scenario-based assessments. CLIM4cities is a European Space Agency (ESA)-funded project under the Artificial Intelligence Trustworthy Applications for Climate programme that applies Machine Learning (ML) techniques to downscale near-surface air temperature (T2m) and land surface temperature (LST) in urban environments. By integrating numerical weather prediction outputs, Earth Observation data, and quality-controlled crowdsourced observations, CLIM4cities provides sub-kilometric urban temperature information tailored to local decision-making needs. The project constitutes a key step towards the development of cost-effective Urban Climate and Weather components that are interoperable with local Digital Twin systems. During its first phase, CLIM4cities developed and evaluated coupled ML-based downscaling models for T2m and LST across four Danish metropolitan areas (e.g. Aalborg, Arhus, Odense and Kobenhavn), demonstrating the feasibility and transferability of the proposed approach. For LST, Sentinel-3 thermal observations and vegetation-related predictors were employed within a scale-invariance downscaling approach, with independent validation using Landsat 8/9 data. Results show that while non-linear ML models can enhance predictive skill at coarser spatial scales, their performance at finer resolutions is limited by the breakdown of scale-invariance assumptions. Incorporating residual correction proved essential to recover fine-scale variability, whereas timestamp-specific linear models often outperformed more complex ML architectures. Model performance exhibits strong seasonal dependence, with the highest score achieved in summer (R² ≈ 0.75), when reduced cloudiness and drier conditions enhance the representation of urban thermal patterns. In contrast, T2m downscaling achieved its highest skill using comparatively simpler modelling approaches. Random Forest models consistently performed well across both spatial and temporal evaluation datasets, increased model complexity did not yield substantial gains. Model performance was assessed under average conditions as well as during heatwave and cold-wave events, complemented by sensitivity analyses of key hyperparameters. The results indicate an R² of 0.98 under average conditions, remaining stable during heatwaves and decreasing marginally to 0.97 during cold events. Mean absolute errors below 1K across all subsets confirm the robustness and operational suitability of the approach for monitoring urban-scale atmospheric temperature variability. Building on these results, the ongoing CLIM4cities project extension focuses on replicating and validating the T2m ML framework across additional European metropolitan regions spanning diverse climatic and urban contexts. Case studies include Copenhagen, Athens, Seville, and Lisbon, enabling a systematic evaluation of model behaviour across climate zones.

Chapter 1: Governance and Planning of Mega-City Regions: Diverse Processes and Reconstituted State Spaces Jiang Xu and Anthony G.O. Yeh Part I: Multi-Level Governance and Planning in Europe Chapter 2: The Polycentric Metropolis: a Western European Perspective on Mega-City Regions Sir Peter Hall Chapter 3: Innovations in Governance and Planning: Randstad Cooperation Willem Salet Chapter 4: Strategic Planning and Regional Governance in Europe: Recent Trends and Policy Responses Louis Albrechts Part II: Multi-Polity Governance and Planning in Federacy Chapter 5: Novel Spatial Formats: Megaregions and Global Cities Saskia Sassen Chapter 6: America 2050: Towards a Twenty-first Century National Infrastructure Investment Plan for the United States Robert D. Yaro Chapter 7: Mega-City Regional Cooperation in the United States and Western Europe: A Comparative Perspective Linda McCarthy Chapter 8: Regions of Cities: Metropolitan Governance and Planning in Australia John Abbott Chapter 9: The Upper Spencer Gulf Common Purpose Group: A Model of Intra - Regional Cooperation for Economic Development Jim Harvey and Brian Cheers Part III: State-Led Governance and Planning under Transition Chapter 10: Coordinating the Fragmented Mega-City Regions in China: State Reconstruction and Regional Strategic Planning Jiang Xu and Anthony G.O. Yeh Chapter 11: Spatial Planning for Urban Agglomeration in the Yangtze River Delta Chaolin Gu, Taofang Yu, Xiaoming Zhang, Chun Wang, Min Zhang, Cheng Zhang and Lu Chen John Abbott is a practicing metropolitan planner in South East Queensland, Australia. He was previously the Project Coordinator of the SEQ 2001 and SEQ 2021 regional planning projects. He teaches planning theory and metropolitan planning at the University of Queensland. He has analyzed metropolitan planning processes in South East Queensland, Greater Vancouver, and New York using concepts of planning as managing uncertainty. Louis Albrechts is Professor of Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include strategic spatial planning, sustainable development, and regional design, and he has published widely on these issues. He is the founder and co-editor of European Planning Studies, a corresponding member of the German Academy for Research and Planning, and a member of the Advisory Board of the global Research Network on Human Settlements. Brain Cheers is Research Professor Emeritus of Community Development and former Director of the Center for Rural and Regional Development at the Whyalla Campus of the University of South Australia. He is also Founding Director of the Northern Australia Research Institute and the Center for Social and Welfare Research at James Cook University. He has published four books, and many monographs and papers on rural and regional issues. Lu Chen is PhD candidate in Economic Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Chaolin Gu is Professor, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. He has published sixteen books and over 260 articles on urban and regional planning, regional economics, and urban geography in China. He is the principal investigator of a number of projects on China's urban and regional development and planning. He is Vice President of the Chinese Geographical Association, and serves on editorial boards of many journals and academic councils. Sir Peter Hall is Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London. He has received the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for distinction in research, and is an honorary member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, which awarded him its Gold Medal in 2003. He holds fourteen honorary doctorates from universities in the UK, Sweden, and Canada. He received the 2005 Balzan Prize for work on the Social and Cultural History of Cities since the Beginning of the 16th Century. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the European Academy and President of the Town and Country Planning Association. He was knighted in 1998 and in 2003 was named by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a Pioneer in the Life of the Nation at a reception in Buckingham Palace. Jim Harvey is Adjunct Professor of the Center for Rural Health and Community Development at the University of South Australia. His most recent publications have been on intra-regional cooperation in urban and regional development. He is currently the Australian Manager of an Australian Aid (AusAid) community development project in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua and New Guinea. Linda McCarthy is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is also a certified planner. Her research focuses on urban and regional economic development and planning in the United States, Western Europe, and China. Her publications comprise books, book chapters, reports, and articles in peer reviewed journals such as Environment and Planning A, The Professional Geographer, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Journal of Planning Education and Research, and Land Use Policy. Willem Salet is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. He is also the President of the Association of European Schools of Planning. His research specializes in spatial planning and metropolitan governance, urban networks, and decision making in strategic urban projects. He coordinated various research projects on behalf of the European Union, national ministries, the National Scientific Foundation, and other stakeholders in the field of urban studies, and has published widely on regional planning and governance. Saskia Sassen is Robert S.Lynd Professor of Sociology of Department of Sociology and Member of the Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University. Her most recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007). Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her comments have appeared in Guardian, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, and Financial Times, among others. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Chun Wang is an urban planner in the Master Planning Department at Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute. Jiang Xu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Resource Management, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a specialist in urban and regional issues, and is currently leading research projects in intercity competition and cooperation, as well as urban and regional governance in China. Dr. Xu has published widely on urban and regional development in leading international journals and is co-author with F. Wu and Anthony G.O. Yeh of Urban Development in Post Reform China: State, Market and Space (Routledge 2007). She was the recipient of the 2008 Research Output Prize of the University of Hong Kong. Robert Yaro is President of Regional Plan Association, America's oldest independent metropolitan policy, research, and advocacy group. He is also Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts. He co-chairs the Empire State Transportation Alliance and the Friends of Moynihan Station, and is Vice President of the Forum for Urban Design. He serves on Mayor Bloomberg's Sustainability Advisory Board, which helped prepare PlaNYC 2030, New York City's new long-range sustainability plan. Anthony Yeh is Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also Chair Professor and Head, Department of Urban Planning and Design, and Director, Center of Urban Studies and Urban Planning, University of Hong Kong. His main areas of specialization are in urban development and planning in Hong Kong and China, and the application ofaGIS in urban and regional planning. At present, he is Secretary-General of the Asian Planning Schools Association and Asia GIS Association. He is on the editorial boards of key international and Chinese journals, and has published over thirty books and monographs, and over 180 academic journal papers and book chapters. He received the 2008 UN-HABITAT Lecture Award for his outstanding and sustained contribution to research, thinking, and practice in the human settlements field. Taofang Yu is Lecturer, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. He has published four books and about fifty articles on urban competition and the mega city-region. Cheng Zhang, is a certified urban planner, and is performing civil service at the Nanjing Urban Planning Bureau. He has published five articles on the mega city-region and the mega-project. Min Zhang is Associate Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Nanjing University. She has published about 30 articles on urbanization, the megalopolis, and the global city-region. Xiaoming Zhang is PhD candidate, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. He has published about six articles on the mega city-region and spatial regionalization.

Currently, cities are home to more than half of the world's population. The increasing urbanization rates create an unprecedented urban sprawl that worsens the urban climate situation. Urban areas modify their local climate and face the consequent urban climate impacts, which are particularly exacerbated by global climate change. This chapter shares scientific knowledge on how cities affect their climate and how urban spatial planning can mitigate the negative impacts of urban climate. Focus is given on the urban heat island, the most documented aspect of urban climate, directly linked to city spatial characteristics and functions. This phenomenon is explained, and tools and methods to assess it and mitigate its intensity are introduced in an attempt to help urban planners and designers to use climatic knowledge in urban planning to build more sustainable and climate-resilient cities.

Current planning strategies for future urban development often target issues such as housing, transport, water and infrastructure; but very few strategies comprehensively consider the urban climate and its interaction with the built environment. By drawing on recent research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, this article demonstrates the importance of incorporating urban climate understanding and knowledge into urban planning processes to better develop cities that are more sustainable. Melbourne currently experiences the effects of a modified urban climate, with research demonstrating that during the night, urban areas are often warmer than surrounding rural landscapes: an effect known as the ‘urban heat island’. Recent studies also suggest that continuing current patterns of development without intervention would produce degraded urban climates with further exacerbated urban temperatures. With the urgency regarding the enhanced greenhouse effect, the urban heat island is an extremely important issue, as the growing urban population could be further exposed to elevated temperatures. Given our improved understanding of the interactions between the built environment and urban climates, those involved in urban planning and development should begin to adopt this knowledge. Many opportunities exist to intentionally modify the built environment (e.g. cool roofs; water-sensitive urban design) to minimise the risks of developing unfavourable urban climates.

Analysis of spatial and temporal distribution patterns of temperatures in urban and rural areas: Making urban environmental climate maps for supporting urban environmental planning and management in Hiroshima

Current urban climate projections typically assume static urban morphology, potentially overlooking the significant impact of evolving built environments on local climate patterns. This methodological limitation introduces uncertainties in long-term climate assessments, particularly in rapidly developing urban areas. We present a novel approach using a conditional diffusion model, specifically flow matching, to predict future urban morphological changes based on projected land use patterns. Our methodology leverages existing research on land use change prediction as conditional inputs to generate detailed morphological evolution scenarios, including building heights, densities, and spatial configurations. The projected land use maps incorporate both local urban planning constraints and broader development patterns to ensure realistic predictions. Initial results demonstrate the model's capability to generate physically plausible urban morphologies that maintain consistency with projected land use changes while preserving local architectural characteristics. The predictions show promising accuracy in replicating historical morphological transitions, suggesting potential applicability in future scenario modeling. By introducing dynamic morphology predictions into urban climate modeling, our approach enables more comprehensive assessment of future urban climate conditions. This research bridges a critical gap between urban development forecasting and climate projection models, providing urban planners and climatologists with improved tools for adaptive planning. The integration of morphological evolution in climate projections represents a significant advancement in understanding the complex interactions between urban form and local climate patterns, particularly in the context of rapid urbanization and climate change.

<p>It is a well-known fact that in urban areas, human activities result in special climatic conditions. Urban climate studies nowadays are becoming more and more important as their results can be directly used by urban planners, architects and municipal decision-makers. In the framework of a long-term cooperation between the Urban Climate Research Group of the Department of Meteorology at the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and the Department of Environment at the Municipality of Újbuda (district XI of Budapest), regular urban climate measurements are carried out in the district XI of Budapest to detect the urban heat island (UHI) effect on different spatial scales.</p><p>Measuring campaigns were conducted in summer 2018 and later, in spring, summer and autumn 2019 to determine the surface temperature of various urban materials using a Voltcraft IR-280 infrared thermometer. The purpose of these measurements was to obtain information about the thermal properties of different urban surfaces, objects in order to analyse which surfaces are suitable for decreasing and hence mitigating the UHI effect. The impact of the colour of different surfaces and the role of shading are analysed as well. The measurements were carried out at two measuring sites: (i) in the largest public park of the district, called Bikás Park (with 37 measuring points), (ii) in the commercial and public transportation centre of the district, called Móricz Zsigmond Square (with 17 measuring points). Based on the compiled database, a detailed statistical analysis was performed to investigate the thermal properties of various urban surfaces, e.g. pavements, walls, street furniture, sport facilities, water and plant surfaces.</p><p>The results show that the coolest surfaces are natural covers (water, vegetation), while the hottest surfaces are concrete pavements, asphalt and rubber paving when exposed to direct solar radiation. In summer, extremely high surface temperatures can occur, the average surface temperature around noon exceeds 40 °C in the case of dark painted wood objects, asphalt and rubber-paved surfaces with sunny conditions. The analysis focusing on the concrete paving blocks with different colours shows that the average surface temperature of light grey surfaces is 5-7 °C lower than the average temperature of darker colours. During the measurement series, the highest temperatures (over 50 °C) were measured at rubber paving-covered sport facilities and playgrounds, in sunny conditions. This material is very popular because its use has many benefits. Our study shows that the extensive use of these surfaces has a negative impact on the urban climate. These surfaces warm up so much during sunny summer days that the facilities covered with this material become practically unusable due to their extremely hot surface. In the case of this surface material, shading plays an important role as it can effectively control and reduce the warming of rubber paving-covered surfaces.</p>

Microscale RANS (Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes) models are able to simulate the urban climate for entire large cities with a high spatial resolution of up to 5 m horizontally. They do this using data from geographic information systems (GIS) that must be specially processed to provide the models with information about the terrain, buildings, land use, and resolved vegetation. If high-performance computers, for example from research institutions, are not available for the simulations or are beyond the financial scope, the calculation on commercially available servers can take several weeks. The calculation of a reference initial state for a city is often followed by questions regarding adaptation measures due to climate change or the influence of smaller and larger future building developments on the urban climate. These changes lead locally to a change of the urban climate but are also influenced by the urban climate itself.In order to save computational time and to comfortably give a quantitative fast initial assessment, we trained a neural network that predicts the simulation results of a RANS model (for example: air temperature at night and during the day, wind speed, cold air flow) and implemented this network in a GIS. The tool allows to calculate the impact of development projects on the urban climate in a fraction of the time required by a RANS simulation and comes close to the RANS model in terms of accuracy. It can also be used by people without in-depth knowledge of urban climate modeling and is therefore particularly suitable for use, for example, in specialized offices of administrative departments or by project developers.

Urban Climate Multi-Scale Modelling in Bilbao (Spain): A Review

The urban climatic map (UCMap) is an urban climate information tool for planning purpose commonly used in German-speaking countries while local climate zone (LCZ) scheme is developed to link the characteristics urban climate and urban morphology at the city level world widely. These two frameworks differ with each other on the aspect of data sources, classification standards, and planning implementation. This study explores the potential of integrating these two complementary frameworks to identify problematic hot spots and propose some generic urban planning recommendations according to current urban climate standards. To address this issue, the Toulouse Metropole area is taken as a case study; a hybrid Climatope-LCZ map is derived by synthetizing the classification of climatopes, based on the German standard (VDI 3787-Part 1), and LCZs at equivalent spatial positions. Furthermore, the simulated meteorological data about wind and thermal environments of Toulouse Metropole during typical summer season are introduced as evidence for analyzing the mutual benefits on urban climate study and application. According to the results, both the heterogeneous urban geometric characteristics and urban climatic issues within a climatope are well identified spatially by the corresponding composition of LCZ. Likewise, the differences of thermal stress between climatopes but in the same LCZ are also clearly illustrated. Lastly, a list of urban climatic planning recommendations for LCZs is proposed followed by the guidelines in VDI 3787-Part 1. This study proves that hybrid Climatope-LCZ map offers more detailed urban climate information to planners or decision-makers than classic urban climate map framework.