Urban areas are currently facing significant new and/or aggravated existing challenges due to the impacts of climate change, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, urban greenness loss, urban flash floods, air quality degradation, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, geo-hazards, and urban heat fluxes among others. To address these challenges HARMONIA will provide a resilience assessment platform to help urban stakeholders understand and quantify Climate Change (CC) effects. In order to develop and apply the diverse methodologies and applications, four European cities are participating, Milan, Piraeus, Sofia, and Ixelles. Based on satellite and multidimensional urban context data, the HARMONIA platform will offer a user-friendly knowledge base, dispensing detailed information on a local neighborhood and building block level. This will support local decision–making and foster a wide range of applications dedicated to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Specifically, HARMONIA will focus on two types of Climate Change (CC) effects: Natural and humanmade hazards intensified by CC, including urban flooding, soil degradation, geohazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation), heat islands, urban heat fluxes, air quality, and gas emissions.

Geosystems Hellas (GSH) is responsible for a variety of different technical tasks, as well as for leading an integral work package and being the supportive partner of two of the Pilot European Cities, Piraeus, and Ixelles. GSH has collected, evaluated, and analyzed in a GIS environment a large variety of diverse and multidimensional urban context data, aiming to provide up-to-date information on the current state of the pilot cities. The collected and integrated datasets are related to the environmental, land use, socioeconomic and transportation aspects of the urban environment. Furthermore, GSH based on its long-term experience in developing and maintaining WebGIS applications and geospatial platforms, leads the development efforts of a novel urban planning Decision Support System (DSS) based on a comprehensive and holistic risk assessment methodology approach developed under HARMONIA. The urban planning DSS is functionalized to provide urban planning recommendations to policymakers founded upon a multiple hazard risk assessment methodology to eventually enable the transition to more resilient and sustainable urban environments. In addition, the urban planning DSS will be offered as a web-based application with a user-friendly interface leveraging cutting-edge technologies, able to efficiently handle and visualize multidimensional (4D) geospatial information. The overall methodology and the capabilities of the DSS will be applied and demonstrated in all of the HARMONIA Pilot Cities.

The HARMONIA project has received funding from the [European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme] [Euratom Research and Training Programme 2014-2018], under grant agreement No 101003517.

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