CREST Climate-resilient coastal urban infrastructures through digital twinning

CREST is a 3-year project co-funded by the JPI Urban Europe programme and managed by a consortium of 8 partners from France (ETTIS research laboratory of the INRAe- of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment , the Business School of Economics of the University of Bordeaux, Accent Sud association), Poland ( Gmina Kołobrzeg, INnCREASE Sp. z.o.o, IRMiR- Institute of Urban and Regional Development ) and Norway ( Augmentcity AS, Møre og Romsdal Fylkeskommune). The project goal is to help vulnerable urban areas to set-up and roll-out collaborative platforms through the Advanced Technology and Augmented Reality of Digital Twinning and through co-creation approaches, in order to support collective environmental decision-making and innovative policy practices, enabling robust and resilient responses in 3 European urban areas for resilient urban infrastructure adaptation to climate change. Climate change largely impacts urban life. Extreme temperatures have an impact on sea level rise and, subsequently, nefarious events such as floods, droughts and storms have costly impacts on cities' basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods and health. Cities are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions, and so its stakeholders must come forward with out of the box solutions to promote innovation and stimulate urban resilience by limiting negative impacts of climate change. But for a problem to be addressed, it must first be seen and felt. Visualization is a potential way of increasing engagement with climate change, and IT developments, such as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, provide significant advancements that can be transformative in engaging audiences with climate change issues. This is at the basis of Augmentcity which developed a ground-breaking way to operate digital twins of cities, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios.