Provision of baseline data
for sustainable urban
planning and management

Climate change is impacting and will continue to impact the European continent, leading to more frequent heat waves and extreme colds, floods, storms and droughts. In this context, it is even more important for urban residents, city authorities, national and EU institutions to receive information about how they will be affected and to plan accordingly.

To support their climate change adaption strategies, the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, under an EC contract, commissioned GeoVille in 2015 to derive and provide high-resolution population data to show where people reside, where they move during day-time and how they are affected by climate change impacts. In this context, GeoVille developed a unique method to sharpen rough census information to real-world housing locations and add insights into the distribution of the population during the day. The results were then further combined with information on environmental threats and climate change risks such as flood risk datasets or outcomes of urban climate models to derive the exposure of the population. With this information, city planners can derive new information on the number of people exposed to climatic impacts and natural hazards.