SMURBS project on SciΤech Europa Quarterly Magazine
Dr Evangelos Gerasopoulos, Coordinator of the Project, introduces the SMURBS project, which harnesses Earth observation in the service of ‘SMart URBan Solutions for air quality, disasters and city growth’. According to the UN’s ‘World Urbanization Prospects: 2014 Revision’, in today’s increasingly global and interconnected world, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, the continuing urbanisation is projected to add 2.5 billion to the urban population by 2050, and the world population living in cities is expected to increase to 66%. Under these circumstances, sustainable development challenges will increasingly concentrate in cities. It is here that the SMURBS project comes in.Under the umbrella of the ERA-PLANET Network, the SMURBS project aims at setting the stage for the integration of the still fragmented Earth observation (EO) resources to promote and co-ordinate the ‘smart city’ concept into a European network of cities, serving the need for a common approach to enhance environmental and societal resilience to specific pressures.
