KTH Professor speaker at UN COP26 side event - Earth observations to build climate resilient cities

Cities around the world face numerous environmental hazards—such as extreme heat events, landslides, pollution, and flooding— that they must monitor and address to reduce risks to, enhance resilience of, their residents to climate change impacts. Earth observations allow cities and other types of human settlements to be monitored and understood in comprehensive ways and deliver up-to-date insights to decision makers.

The hybrid event shared how the The Earth Observations Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements can be used to measure and analyze Sustainable Development Goal indicators and climate change - related risks and vulnerabilities for cities and other human settlements.

Yifang Ban spoke about EO Big Data for Monitoring Urbanization & Environmental Impact to Support Sustainable & Resilient Cities. This research is funded by the Swedish National Space Agency and Digital Futures.

The EO Toolkit for Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements

The Toolkit  provides ready-to-use Earth observation data sets and tools that can support definition and monitoring of indicators, as well as national and city experiences in using spatial data and analysis for monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, and enabling successful, evidence-based decision making. The Toolkit can be applied in policy areas that are important to delivering successful and sustainable cities, such as sustainable urban planning; adequate housing; access to public transport; and access to public spaces. Earth observation data can provide significant cost and time savings in urban monitoring and indicator measurement, particularly over large areas or areas where little data is available.