Resilience has become an important necessity for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Mitigation and adaptation actions that enhance the resilience of cities need to be based on a sound understanding and quantification of the drivers of urban transformation and settlement structures, human and urban vulnerability, and of local and global climate change. Copernicus, as the means for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation (EO), is based on continuously evolving Core Services. A major challenge for the EO community is the innovative exploitation of the Copernicus products in dealing with urban sustainability towards increasing urban resilience. Due to the multidimensional nature of urban resilience, to meet this challenge, information from more than one Copernicus Core Services, namely the Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), the Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Emergency Management Service (EMS), is needed. Furthermore, to address urban resilience, the urban planning community needs spatially disaggregated environmental information at local (neighbourhood) and city scales. Such information, for all parameters needed, is not yet directly available from the Copernicus Core Services mentioned above, while several elements - data and products - from contemporary satellite missions consist valuable tools for retrieving urban environmental parameters at local scale. The H2020-Space project CURE (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe) is a joint effort of 10 partners from 9 countries that synergistically exploits the above Copernicus Core Services to develop an umbrella cross-cutting application for urban resilience, consisting of individual cross-cutting applications for climate change adaptation/mitigation, energy and economy, as well as healthy cities and social environments, at several European cities. These cross-cutting applications cope with the required scale and granularity by also integrating or exploiting third-party data, in-situ observations and modelling. CURE uses DIAS (Data and Information Access Services) to develop a system capable of supporting operational applications and downstream services across Europe. The CURE system hosts the developed cross-cutting applications, enabling its incorporation into operational services in the future. CURE is expected to increase the value of Copernicus Core Services for future emerging applications in the domain of urban resilience, exploiting also the improved data quality, coverage and revisit times of the future satellite missions. Thus, CURE will lead to more efficient routine urban planning activities with obvious socioeconomic impact, as well as to more efficient resilience planning activities related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, resulting in improved thermal comfort and air quality, as well as in enhanced energy efficiency. The CURE impact is maximized by developing synergies with EuroGEOSS and Climate-KIC, as well as by exploring the conditions under which, specific CURE outcomes could be integrated into the operational Copernicus service portfolio. The added value and benefit expected to emerge from CURE is related to transformed urban governance and quality of life, because it is expected to provide improved and integrated information to city administrators, hence effectively supporting strategies for resilience planning at local and city scales, towards the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda for Europe.

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.