description
- 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. The objective of the Pan-European Urban Climate Service (PUCS) project is to establish a service that translates the best available scientific urban climate data into relevant information for public and private end-users operating in cities. This will be achieved by demonstrating the benefits of urban climate information to end-users, considering the sectors of energy, cultural heritage, mobility, energy, health, and urban planning. During the first half of the 30-month project, end-users (included as partners) and climate service providers will be involved in the co-design/-development of six concrete sectoral cases, to be implemented in Antwerp, Barcelona, Bern, Prague, Rome, and Vienna. Each of these cases will be subject to a detailed socio-economic impact analysis, quantifying the benefits of using urban climate information. The second half of the project will focus on upscaling and market replication, initially aiming at the extension with six new cases, involving new (non-financed) end-users. Through a business development strategy, supported by dissemination and marketing activities, we ultimately aim at acquiring six more cases by the end of the project, involving new business intermediaries without PUCS project financing, and demonstrating the long-term market viability of the service. PUCS aims 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.