Climate-Aware Risk and Resilience Assessment of Urban Areas under Multiple Environmental Stressors via Multi-Tiered Digital City Twinning
What is the impact of a prolonged pandemic shutdown on an urban community? How much and how long would it cost to rebuild a town after a severe storm or a strong earthquake? What would the impact of climate change be on an Aegean island fifty years from today? How could one best mitigate such risks by leveraging policies and financial tools? The National Technical University of Athens in co-operation with the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Resilience Guard Gmbh, RED Risk Spa and researchers from the University of Notre Dame, Texas Tech, EPFL and AUTH are proposing the creation of the TwinCity platform to answer exactly these questions. TwinCity aims to leverage existing tools and services (e.g., climate models, modelling of extreme events and their impacts, EU services, etc.), and develop novel technologies (Layered-Block Models, City Digital Twins) to deliver an integrated socioeconomic resilience assessment platform, addressing multi-hazard risk understanding, better preparedness, faster, adapted and efficient response, and sustainable reconstruction of urban areas. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity offered by the COVID-19 quarantine to calibrate for the effect of business shutdown and recovery, TwinCity offers a robust digital twin of an urban area that accounts for local socioeconomic and business ecosystems to run end-to-end simulations of multiple “what-if” disruption scenarios. The final goal is to offer an open-source basis upon which performance, risk and resilience can be assessed by stake-holders, to be tested with a large-scale pilot study of an island Greek town subject to earthquake and weather/climate hazards.