RESCCUE RAF app – using technology to mitigate climate change urban impacts.

Abstract

The constant expansion of urban areas ant its services has created new challenges to city managers. Climate Change (CC) is one of the most important topics, taking special importance in urban areas. Given its scalability, technology can take an important role to help city managers identify and mitigate specific CC-related problems in these areas. In this paper, a web application is presented to empower city managers with a tool that give them detailed data about their cities resilience to cope with CC, accessible from anywhere. The usage of this app allows city managers to take optimized measures to suppress weak areas of each city. This app is integrated as a service of the Portuguese Infrastructures Roadmap, under the Infraestrutura Nacional de Computação Distribuída (INCD) project INCD provides the resources for the apps’ data computation and storage, and assures its scalability to handle multiple user requests as well as database storage growth. This app uses a methodology of city assessment that goes deep into city services processes, identifying the specific areas that have higher vulnerability to CC hazards. The identification of these areas allows the city managers to implement incisive measures and to estimate costs of those measures improving the city resilience. Three case studies are being carried out in different cities (Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol). Despite the complexity of the methodology of urban assessment, the RESCCUE RAF app can be accessed using a user-friendly interface that can be accessed from anywhere. The access requires authentication due to sensibility of information processed. After authentication, the user has access to a dedicated area where city information can be filled in, in an intuitive way such as: last review of City Master Plan, history of climate hazards or a detailed way of operation of city services. Then, taking advantage INCD infrastructure, this information is processed on-the-fly and several indicators are calculated. This information can then be explored within the app, at multiple levels, using intuitive and interactive chart and tabular information, from a macro view on overall city resilience to specific items like resilience of a specific process of a city service. These results can support targeted efforts and investments in the services that need to be improved. Given its importance and flexibility, the RESCCUE RAF App can be extended to other cities and take a major role in the urban resilience improvement to cope with climate change effects, contributing in the decision making process to avoid human, material and environmental losses.