Aplicaciones de Copernicus para ciudades verdes, saludables y resilientes en el contexto de la emergencia climática

Resumen

Cities in Europe and globally are dealing with a context of profound socio-economic and environmental challenges. They are an important source of emissions and environmental 139 pressures, but, at the same time, suffer from the consequences of pollution and environmental degradation as well as the effects of climate change. As a response, this situation requires mitigation and adaptation policy-making, based on scientific evidence and complex technical proposals, such as nature-based solutions, to improve air quality or prevent flooding and heat waves. The scientific evidence is based on data collection and analysis. The homogeneous and standardized collection of data is a technological challenge that face many public authorities in times of scarce resources. Different solutions of data collection, analysis and synthesis from Earth Observation have been developed to ease this situation. Particularly, Copernicus, the European Space Programme, offers a wealth of satellite data and thematic services for this context with a free and open data policy. The communication will present different Copernicus applications that help to support policy making in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and of the development of healthy cities. It will summarize the Copernicus services Climate Change (C3S), Atmosphere (CAMS) and Land (CLMS) that are available to public and private users to create applications and sustainable technological solutions, as well as a revision of best practices of these applications in Spanish Cities. The paper aims at showing the possibilities that are provided by these data and services currently available in Copernicus, the applications that are being developed and their potential to design applications that help in the analysis to find solutions to the complex problems urban areas, urban sprawl and the surrounding territories are facing. Finally, the paper provides also an outlook on emerging technological developments such as Big Data handling of satellite data and Artificial Intelligence.