Conference Agenda

The Earth Observations Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements enables the use of Earth observations to advance Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. The Toolkit (https://eotoolkit.unhabitat.org/) represents an ongoing effort to put Earth observations (EO) data and tools into context for analysts in national and city governments, and at local community level. Additional target audiences include policy and decision makers, executive managers and the urban sustainability-interested public. The Toolkit focuses on end user stories that highlight EO applications to improve the timeliness and quality of urban-related indicators, guide policies, and support sustainable urban development. It is a multi-stakeholder partnership that facilitates engagement among local communities, cities, national agencies, and EO experts. It also aims to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration between local communities, cities and countries.

RethinkAction (https://rethinkaction.eu/#project) is an EU Horizon-funded project running from 2021-2025. The project aims to develop an innovative digital platform to improve land use planning, enhance climate resilience, and engage local communities in sustainable solutions and behavioral change. The project has a strong emphasis on multi-stakeholder co-creation across the six case study regions for the project located in Italy, France, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden.

The platform includes a database of potential Land Use Adaptation and Mitigation Solutions (LAMS)and land-based policy recommendations that cities can access based on the challenges that they face and factors from their local context. It also includes a multiscale evaluation framework for future scenarios consistent across local, EU, and global scales and dynamic models for the integrated assessment of potential solutions.

At this phase of the project, a prototype of the platform has been developed and will be presented to stakeholders for their feedback via an upcoming workshop series.

The demonstration will illustrate how to navigate the GHSL website and to access the different data sets, tools and knowledge products.

Urban TEP (Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform) https://urban-tep.eu serves as an information hub providing data and services to support sustainable urban development. Launched as an ESA project in 2015, it was conducted by a consortium led by DLR (with Terradue, GISAT, Brockmann Consult, and IT4I), in cooperation with a team of public and private experts from the Earth Observation sector. The fly-through presentation will outline the resources and services available on the Urban TEP platform, with a focus on the latest cooperation with UN-Habitat. This collaboration leverages the platform’s technologies and integrates a new generation of global urban datasets (e.g. GHSL and World Settlement Footprint suites) to streamline the production of high-quality urban information for SDG indicator 11.3.1 worldwide, in an accessible and interactive manner.