City planers, architects and politicians are facing new challenges as climate change is putting increasing stress on the built environment and communities. In the course of the EU funded research program CLARITY (Integrated Climate Adaptation Service Tools for Improving Resilience Measure Efficiency), new digital solutions and tools were developed to assist climate experts and urban planners to predict negative impacts of the climate crisis on Europe's cities and derive appropriate countermeasures. Under the lead of AIT Austrian Institute of Technology the prototype of a climate risk and adaptation assessment tool was developed. This tool allows for calculating climate hazards and their potential impacts on infrastructure and population and assessing the effectiveness of climate adaptation options. The city of Linz was involved in this project as a focus region on the topic of heat stress. The prototype developed as part of the project is based, among other things, on the EMIKAT data analysis system developed at the AIT Center for Digital Safety & Security. This makes it possible to calculate climate hazards and their potential impact on infrastructure and the population and to estimate the effectiveness of climate adaptation options for cities throughout Europe.
Building upon this, the KLIMALINZ project will make this prototype applicable for use in urban climate planning for Linz. The digital KLIMALINZ tool is intended to support both internal experts in urban planning and urban climatology in their daily work as well as external planners (e.g., infrastructure and real estate developers or architects) in project submissions.
Increasing extreme weather events due to climate change pose a high risk for dense development and infrastructure. According to findings from the CLARITY project and the urban climate analysis, at least some of these negative impacts can be mitigated through adaptation-oriented urban planning.
Project KLIMALINZ aims to provide a rough (initial) assessment without much effort for the city of Linz. Additionally, it should be possible to assess the climate impacts of smaller projects at low cost and collect basic information on the urban climate, future developments and risks, and recommended adaptation measures.
Existing data, for example from the urban climate analysis, will be processed for follow-up calculations. In addition to that data from a fine-meshed microclimate measurement network, that will be established in Linz in parallel, will be included.
All data will be merged with models from the CLARITY project and further developed regarding the technical requirements of the city of Linz. Model results and collected data will be compared, evaluated and if applicable integrated into the KLIMALINZ tool.
The project KLIMALINZ is supported by the Climate Fund of the City of Linz.