Project ID

Acronym CREST​

Full project name Climate-resilient coastal urban infrastructures through digital twinning​

​Funding programme JPI Urban Europe ​

Project start 1 April, 2022​

Project duration 36 months​

Project Coordinator Augmentcity AS

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Project Goal Help vulnerable urban areas to set-up and roll-out collaborative platforms through digital twinning and co-creation approaches to support environmental decision-making and innovative policy practices, enabling robust and resilient responses to climate change.

Target Groups Public Authorities (regional/local governments, municipalities, city halls, etc); Researchers (spatial planners, climatologists, social scientists, etc); Companies (utilities, transport, construction, real estate, cooperatives, producers, innovators/technologists, etc); Civil society (environmental NGOs, Consumer organizations); Citizens (households/residents)

CREST in details

Context

Climate change largely impacts urban life. Extreme temperatures have an impact on sea level rise and, subsequently, nefarious events such as floods, droughts and storms have costly impacts on cities’ basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods and health. Cities are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions, and so its stakeholders must come forward with out-of-the-box solutions to promote innovation and stimulate urban resilience by limiting the negative impacts of climate change. But for a problem to be addressed, it must first be seen and felt. Visualization is a potential way of increasing the engagement with climate change, and IT developments, such as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, provide significant advancements that can be transformative in engaging audiences with climate change issues. This is at the core of Augmentcity which developed a ground-breaking way to operate digital twins of cities, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios to be analysed and visualised in an interactive and immersive visualisation tool to be used by policy-makers, researchers, companies and citizens.

CREST builds on AugmentCity and applies it in terms of demonstration, co-creation and mobilization of stakeholders for capacity-building and collective decision-making in 3 European urban areas for resilient urban infrastructure adaptation to climate change.

CREST Objectives & Key Activities

The related activities will identify and select relevant key performance indicators and collect respective data for performing sustainability and resilience monitoring and climate impact assessment in the targeted urban areas, as well as for feeding the Digital Twin visualizations/simulations.

Digital Twins will develop, install, run and improve/upscale GDTs for the 3 urban areas. This will enhance the user experience which in turn, will enable seamless collaboration and co‐creation between all actors using gamification and simulation.

Policy co-creation processes based on participatory/citizen science approach will map state-of-the-art to create a deeper understanding of the local status quo and will engage local communities to determine the climate resilience challenges to be the use cases for the co-creation and digital twinning experiments in the 3 urban areas (pilot sites). Following a common methodology, these experiments will be organized in all pilot sites in the framework of 2 co-creation workshops (using a control group approach), as well as subsequent follow-up activities.

Communication, dissemination, and sustainability activities will be responsible for maximizing CREST ́s visibility, and the sustainability and replicability of its results locally and at a larger geographical scale (European and global), engaging, therefore, a broader public.