Urban areas are very vulnerable to climate change impacts, because of the high concentration of people, infrastructure, and economic activity, but also because cities tend to exacerbate climate extremes such as heat waves and flash floods. In addition, the ongoing urban expansion and the ageing of the urban population makes them particularly vulnerable. European cities are home to about 75% of the population, projected to grow to 80% in 2050.
Climate change leads to more frequent and intense heat waves. Heat waves are ‘silent killers’, claiming more victims than any other weather-related disaster. The European heat wave of 2003 was particularly severe, leading to an estimated 70,000 premature deaths. Apart from impacting health, extreme heat also adversely affects energy consumption, city tourism, and infrastructure, e.g. causing steel railway tracks to buckle, and damaging concrete and asphalt roads.
With respect to water, the abundance of impermeable surfaces in cities leads to inundations that are often far more intense than those occurring in rural areas, damaging property and infrastructure, and causing economic losses arising from disrupted transportation. Furthermore, cities are experiencing increasing densities with hard impermeable surface, which in combination with the climate change projected increase in extreme precipitation, will further increase urban flooding impacts from extreme precipitation.
The objective of the Climate-fit.City project was to establish a sustainable service that translates the best available scientific urban climate data into relevant information for public and private end-users operating in cities. This has been achieved by demonstrating the benefits of urban climate information to relevant end user communities, considering services in diverse domains (Climate and Health, Building Energy, Emergency Planning, Urban Planning, Active Mobility, Tourism and Cultural Heritage) to improve decision-making and to help end users to better address the consequences of climate change at the local scale. Climate-fit.City aimed at a genuine market uptake of urban climate services, based on a distributed network of local business intermediaries throughout Europe, enhancing the awareness for urban climate-related issues in the end-user community, and converting (mature) research results into tailored added-value information, thus removing important barriers for the deployment of urban climate services. Three major customer groups have been identified: urban administrations, territorial entities and private/commercial entities delivering services to cities/towns.
