Leveraging the power of earth observations in building climate resilience in cities

Imagine you are a city official responsible for determining the most cost-effective actions to manage a range of climate-related risks, while pursuing mitigation and designing adaptation within a broader and complex governing and societal environment. To make the most appropriate decisions, you need reliable data and information available, which in many parts of the world remain scarce or simply unavailable.

The Group on Earth Observations and UN-HABITAT actively promote the role that Earth observations (EO) and geospatial information can play in urban monitoring, reporting processes on sustainable development goals (SDGs) targets and indicators. Further, sustainable cities and communities demand a strong link between the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement, and the New Urban Agenda, to meet the greatest challenges in urban areas, including decent housing and resilient infrastructure.

EO approaches, incorporating satellite and in-situ platforms supplemented by modelling and AI capacities, can offer a wide range of cost-effective means of delivering globally essential data, that are relevant at the urban scale to analysis and insight on the scale and nature of climatic hazards, the exposure of people, infrastructure and other assets to those hazards, as well as critical factors affecting the vulnerability and hence the risk. EO approaches can deliver timely, and very localised data, provide the basis for historic and future projections of climate risk, and set the scene to design a sustainable future.

Local governments and municipal authorities are beginning to meaningfully engage with EO experts in the above contexts. Networks of such actors, for example, C40 and ICLEI, as well as the Resilient Cities Network provide an excellent entry point for linking across the science-policy-society interface, in both highlighting opportunities where EO may plug into critical urban data gaps, whilst drawing attention to the range of use-cases where EO could drive sustainable and resilient transformation of cities. But to meet future expectations, more concrete synergies are certainly needed.

Through flashtalks and a facilitated discussion between panellists and the audience we will:
• Showcase the value and usefulness of Earth observations in the urban context for understanding and managing climate-risks and apply Earth observation-based tools in their normal operations to enhance their resilience;
• Explore key challenges for cities and their communities in understanding and managing climate-risks i.e., data availability, spatial inequality / climate injustices, policy and investment responses to urban climate adaptation and resilience
• Hear from cities and their representative organisations and researchers, data and technology providers to better understand data and capacity needs by regions of the world and how to support urban planning through really transformative ways, starting from co-design and co-production of data, tools, and service