HARMONIA Project

The HARMONIA Project: Tackling Climate Change Challenges in Urban Areas

The HARMONIA project addresses major climate change challenges affecting urban areas.

Cities are increasingly exposed to risks such as extreme weather events, flooding, urban heat islands, air pollution and geohazards. HARMONIA supports local stakeholders with data-driven tools that help them understand these risks and improve urban resilience.

Urban Climate Challenges

Urban areas face growing pressure from climate-related hazards.

These challenges can affect public safety, infrastructure, quality of life and long-term sustainability.

The HARMONIA project focuses on key urban risks, including:

• extreme weather events
• flooding
• heat islands
• air pollution
• geohazards

By assessing these risks, the project helps cities plan better adaptation and mitigation actions.

Resilience Assessment Platform

HARMONIA develops a resilience assessment platform for urban environments.

The platform uses satellite data and multidimensional urban information to support decision-making at neighbourhood and building-block level.

This approach helps local authorities, planners and policy-makers make more informed decisions for climate adaptation, risk reduction and sustainable urban planning.

HARMONIA Pilot Cities

The HARMONIA approach is demonstrated in four European pilot cities:

• Milan
• Piraeus
• Sofia
• Ixelles

These pilot cities allow the project to test and validate its methodology in different urban environments.

GEOSYSTEMS HELLAS Role in HARMONIA

GEOSYSTEMS HELLAS S.A. (GSH) plays an important role in the HARMONIA project.

GSH leads an integral work package and supports the pilot cities of Piraeus and Ixelles. The company collects, evaluates and analyses urban data using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

This work covers several urban aspects, including environmental conditions, land use, socioeconomic data and transportation.

Urban Planning Decision Support System

Building on its experience in WebGIS applications and geospatial platforms, GEOSYSTEMS HELLAS leads the development of the Urban Planning Decision Support System (DSS).

The DSS is based on a holistic risk assessment methodology. It supports policy-makers by providing urban planning recommendations for more resilient and sustainable cities.

The system follows a multi-hazard risk assessment approach and is delivered as a web-based application with an intuitive interface. It can handle and visualize multidimensional 4D geospatial data.

Project Status and Funding

The HARMONIA project has been completed.

The project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 101003517.