Climate Ready Barcelona works on databases to enable the creation of tools to combat the impacts of climate change
Climate innovation with Climate Ready Barcelona
The Climate Ready Barcelona project takes an innovative approach to addressing the challenges of climate change, energy transition, and urban sustainability. This project is funded by the Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) organization to develop new technologies that allow cities to tackle the climate and energy crisis with a focus on citizens.
Specifically, Climate Ready Barcelona is developing the La Meva Energia application to support Barcelona’s Energy Advice Points and their users, as well as a climate vulnerability map that gathers, calculates, and visualizes data on consumption, energy, the environment, infrastructure, and socioeconomic characteristics to build a climate vulnerability index.
Measuring climate vulnerability first to take action
The use of the map and the climate vulnerability index will allow the identification of the city areas most exposed to climate change impacts and the analysis of the factors contributing to this vulnerability. This information will be crucial in defining and prioritizing concrete actions that reduce risks, ensuring a more effective response tailored to the specific needs of each area.
For this reason, the map will be highly useful for public administrations and decision-makers to design policies that promote sustainability and climate resilience.
Data: the foundation for building new initiatives
The construction of this map is based on an extensive compilation of city data, the BIGG Ontology, an open-source tool developed by the BeeGroup at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE), which offers a structured framework for describing and categorizing city data.
The primary goal of the BIGG Ontology is to standardize the representation of all data that may explain climate vulnerability in the city of Barcelona: from energy consumption data, cadastral, socioeconomic, and demographic information, to green and shaded areas. Each source has its own format and language. The ontology organizes these data, ensuring that they are coherently structured, compatible, and provide a clear and reliable overview. Furthermore, this harmonization allows the data to be analyzed and visualized seamlessly through the future map.
Additionally, this process not only organizes and integrates information from various formats and aggregation levels but also enables the calculation of key indicators essential for vulnerability analysis, which are indispensable for designing effective policies and actions.
Los datos armonizados de la ciudad de Barcelona se encuentran disponibles en un segundo repositorio público, donde para cada fuente de datos, se proporciona una descripción del tipo de dato, formato, nivel de agregación y cómo se ha transformado para ajustar en el sistema común.
Shared knowledge to transform the urban future
The aim of making this information public and open-source is to empower researchers, administrative technicians, policymakers, and citizens to understand the process of data collection and structuring, and use it to develop new tools and initiatives that promote climate resilience, adaptable and applicable to various contexts and municipalities.
