Urban thermal risk reduction: Developing and implementing spatially explicit services for resilient cities

Abstract

Elevated urban temperatures and heatwaves are a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of the continuously growing urban population and are projected to worsen under climate change. For this reason well-informed disaster risk reduction (DRR) actions, where science and technology play a key role, are required. However insufficient communication between scientific and policy-making communities (known as the science-policy gap) hampers the use of science in DRR. Hence there is a strong need to interpret existing scientific knowledge into actionable knowledge, i.e. science that is useful, usable and used. This article presents a series of services and tools that build-upon existing scientific knowledge and aim to provide actionable knowledge to authorities and citizens for reducing the risks of elevated urban temperatures. The above were implemented in the context of the European Commission’s Thermal Risk rEduction Actions and tools for secURE cities (TREASURE) project, and address many of the goals and priorities for action set in the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction (SFDRR) of the United Nations. A key policy-making user of the implemented services and tools is the City of Athens in Greece, which is one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe.