HARMONIA

Project title: Development of a Support System for Improved Resilience and Sustainable Urban areas to cope with Climate Change and Extreme Events based on GEOSS and Advanced Modelling Tools

DTP Project Acronym: HARMONIA

Funding : Horizon 2020 | H2020-LC-CLA-2020-2  | nr. 101003517

Name of the lead partner organization: The Polytechnic University of Milan – Politecnico Di Milano (POLIMI)

Project duration: 44 months (01.06.2021 – 01.02.2025)

Project budget: 4 999 803.61EUR

Project web page: Harmonia

Facebook: @HarmoniaProject2021

Twitter: @ProjectHarmonia

LinkedIn : Harmonia project

Harmonia aims to unite all relevant stakeholders around the issue of Climate Change by providing a resilience assessment platform to understand, visualize and quantify Climate Changes effects.

HARMONIA OBJECTIVES

Based on satellite and auxiliary data, the HARMONIA platform will offer a user-friendly knowledge base, dispensing detailed information on a local neighbourhood and street level. This will support local decision making and foster a wide range of applications dedicated to climate adaptation and mitigation, such as Carbon Capture and Storage technologies.

HARMONIA leverages a wealth of existing Earth Observation (EO) Datasets and services ‒ including GEOSS, Copernicus and ESA data and services. This will be capitalised with ensemble modelling of socio-economic and in-situ data to deliver an Integrated Resilience Assessment Platform (IRAP).
IRAP is a system that allows stakeholders to model a range of planning options against a number of CC scenarios.

The HARMONIA platform will allow stakeholders to not only understand but also visualize the impact of CC across different environments. This will enhance cities’ preparedness to respond to specific predictions, such as floods or dust storms, and protect their residents and assets.

Specifically, HARMONIA will focus on two types of Climate Change (CC) effects:

– Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC, including urban flooding, soil degradation and geohazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation)

– Manmade hazards, such as heat islands, urban heat fluxes, air quality, gas emissions.

Harmonia will:

  • Incorporate multi-disciplinary knowledge and assessments
  • Address hazards connected to Climate Change
  • Address geological hazards (geohazards)
  • Identify and define intervention necessity indices

Harmonia brings added value to :

  • Local Authorities :
    HARMONIA will allow cities to better assess their vulnerability to Climate Change effects and to identify corresponding actions and investments to increase their resilience.
  • Citizens and NGOs :
    Climate Change hazards not only destroy infrastructure and disrupt economies but also pose a serious health challenge to citizens. HARMONIA is designed to provide key information for local measures aiming to improve urban greenness, air quality, mobility and many other important aspects of our quality of life.

  • Industry and Academia :
    The integration of different data sources at the local level, including demographic and environmental data, will stimulate knowledge spillovers and technological improvements, notably in computer vision and machine learning.

URBASOFIA’S ROLE

Actively involved since the designing of the proposal, URBASOFIA helps to implement urban innovative actions and local action plans within a participatory process, leading the process to identify and engage the stakeholders and users in the objective to create a strong community around the IRAP platform and reach the best results and efficiency with it use.

The company provides expertise in the stakeholder identification and engagement methodology for the project and collects the different requirements from the future users/pilots cities. URBASOFIA will also set the overall process of citizens participation and related data. Urbasofia’s activities provide up to date and holistic guidance for multi-layered governance, in order to shape vertical and horizontal engagements and get real impact in the locally rooted Harmonia project.