Over the last decades, as a consequence of the effects of climate change, cultural heritage has been impacted by an increasing number of climate related hazards, posing new challenges to conservators and heritage managers. SHELTER aims at developing a data driven and community based knowledge framework that will bring together the scientific community and heritage managers with the objective of increasing resilience, reducing vulnerability and promoting better and safer reconstruction in historic areas. The first step to enhance resilience is associated to the improvement in understanding the direct and indirect impacts of climatic and environmental changes and natural hazards on historic sites and buildings, by linking concepts commonly used in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation with cultural heritage management, in order to provide inclusive and informed decision-making. Comprehensive disaster risk management plans need to be drawn up, based on the specific characteristics of cultural heritage and the nature of the hazards within a regional context, taking into account the diverse heritage typologies as well as the specific socioeconomic conditions, since this directly affect the vulnerability of such systems. By a deep understanding of the hazard, the exposure and the vulnerability of the historic area, the local dynamics and the provision of innovative governance and community based models, it is possible to provide useful methodologies, tools and strategies to enhance resilience and secure sustainable reconstruction. Due to the information complexity and the diverse data sources, SHELTER framework will be implemented in multiscale and multisource data driven platform, able to provide the necessary information for planning and adaptive governance. All the developments of the project will be validated in 5 open-labs, representative of main climatic and environmental challenges in Europe and different heritage’s typologies.

SmartEnCity’s main Objective is to develop a highly adaptable and replicable systemic approach towards urban transformation into sustainable, smart and resource-efficient urban environments in Europe through the integrated planning and implementation of measures aimed at improving energy efficiency in main consuming sectors in cities, while increasing their supply of renewable energy, and demonstrate its benefits. The underlying concept of the proposal is the Smart Zero Carbon City concept, where city carbon footprint and energy demand are kept to a minimum through the use of demand control technologies that save energy and promote raised awareness; energy supply is entirely renewable and clean; and local energy resources are intelligently managed by aware citizens, as well as coordinated public and private stakeholders. This approach will be firstly defined in detail, laid out and implemented in the three Lighthouse demonstrators (Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain, Tartu in Estonia and Sonderborg in Denmark). The three cities will develop a number of coordinated actions aimed at: • Significant demand reduction of the existing residential building stock through cost-effective low energy retrofitting actions at district scale. • Increase in RES share of energy supply, through extensive leveraging of local potentials. • Enhance the use of clean energy in urban mobility, both for citizens and goods, by means of extensive deployment of green vehicles and infrastructure. An extensive use of ICTs is planned to achieve integration and consistency in demo planning and implementation, and to enable further benefits and secure involvement of citizens. These actions will be aligned to city-specific Integrated Urban Plans (IUPs), and the process will be replicated in two Follower cities: Lecce, (Italy), and Asenovgrad (Bulgaria) to ensure adaptability and maximize the project impact. Additionally, a Smart Cities Network will be setup to support project replication at European scale.