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.

GREENGAGE’s vision is to promote innovative governance and help public authorities in shaping their climate mitigation and adaptation policies by engaging with citizens to co-create green initiatives and to develop Citizen Observatories (CO), focusing on mobility, air quality and healthy living supporting the delivery of carbon neutral neighbourhoods. The pan-European research innovation action will develop innovative governance process deploying digital solutions to transform citizen’s engagement and cities’ effectiveness in delivering European Green Deal objectives for carbon neutral cities. Green and digital transformation to carbon neutral cities will be promoted via two interrelated project dimensions. First the enhancement of intelligence applied to city decision making process and governance by engaging with citizen observations integrated with Copernicus, GEOSS, in-situ and socio-economic intelligence, and delivered by innovative governance models based on novel toolboxes of decision-making methodologies and technologies. Second by harnessing the social and cultural opportunities to promote the active engagement of citizens via COs in the collection and use of urban decision-making intelligence supportThe project will achieve the above vision by facilitating citizens to observe and co-create their cities by sensing their urban environments that will complement, validate and enrich information held by the public administrations and/or environment agencies derived from remote sensing data and obtained via other authoritative observations. This enhanced and evidence-based information will be used for smart urban governance including policy evaluation, policy making and decision making. GREENGAGE increases societal awareness by showcasing the environmental challenges (climate change, poor air quality, healthy living) through ‘as-is’ state of the urban environment, highlighting the information and other gaps in the authoritative data held by the public administ