Climate resilient coastal urban infrastructures through digital twinning – CREST

The CREST proposal aims to help vulnerable urban areas to set-up and roll-out collaborative platforms through digital twinning (based on a breakthrough Augmented reality – AR technology: AugmentCity) and co-creation approaches. This will help respond to the EU agenda on Urban Transformation and achieve the UN SDG goals.
CREST will build on past experiences of partners and will apply them in 3 urban areas particularly vulnerable to CC, due to their coastal, or near coast location: Møre og Romsdal (Norway), Bordeaux (France) and Kolobrzeg (Poland). The urban areas share a number of commonalities, mainly due to their geographical positioning, while diverging in the specific challenges they face, deriving from their national/local political, economic, societal and scientific contexts. This exciting mix will allow the application of identical research methodologies in comparable urban settings, while obtaining diverse results and solutions with higher adaptability to further geographies across Europe.

CREST´s aims and objectives will be attained through 5 WPs.

WP1 - Sustainability and resilience monitoring framework of urban areas will identify and select relevant KPIs and collect respective data for performing sustainability and resilience monitoring and climate impact assessment in the targeted urban areas, as well as for feeding the Digital Twin visualizations/simulations in WP3.

WP2 - Policy co-creation processes based on participatory/citizen science approach will map state-of-the-art to create a deeper understanding of the local status quo and will engage local communities to determine the climate resilience challenges to be the use cases for the co-creation and digital twinning experiments in the 3 urban areas. Following a common methodology, these experiments will be organised in all pilot sites in the framework of 2 co-creation workshops, as well as subsequent follow-up activities.

WP3 - Digital Twins will develop, install, run and improve/upscale DTs for the 3 urban areas.

WP4 - Communication, dissemination and sustainability will be responsible for maximising CREST´s visibility and the sustainability and replicability of its results locally and at a larger geographical scale (European and global).

WP5 - Project Management will secure the effective coordination and management of CREST, including liaising with the EC and national funding agencies, communication between partners, administrative, financial and contractual management. quality control and risk management, innovation and IPR management, data management and data protection.

CREST´s vision is to place CC, its impacts and risks into the mainstream of economic and urban transformation policies at all levels of governance, and in particular at local level, as urban areas can be more affected by its negative impacts. CREST will have public authorities leading the way towards urban innovation for CC adaptation.
The CREST´s short term/immediate foreseen impacts are:

1) Awareness raising on CC impacts, CC resilience / improvement of understanding of our future & Awareness/knowledge increase in AR/VR technologies as decision support tools.
Impact type: Capacity building; Impact level:>200.000 lay citizens, public authority staff, researchers, companies, civil society reached at local/European/global level + Public authorities, companies, civil society, researchers at local levels directly engaged in the project: >250; awareness/knowledge increase: >20%

2) Strengthening technical and institutional capacities.
Impact type: Capacity building; Impact level: The knowledge and tools (DTs, co-creation methods, solutions, platform) transferred via CREST activities to the involved public authorities will reinforce their technical and institutional capacities, including in digitalisation (in VR/AR), citizen and stakeholder engagement and participative urban resilience decision-making. Participants in co-creation/dissemination/engagement activities: >100 authority staff. Capacity increase: >30%

3) Improvement in transversal skills: consensus building, mutual respect, diversity, listening.
Impact type: Capacity building; Impact level: Participants in co-creation: public authorities, companies, civil society, researchers, citizens: ~150; Skill improvement: >15%

4) Improvement in trust in and acceptance of co-created policy decisions.
Impact type: Trust/social acceptance; Impact level: Participants in co-creation: companies, civil society, researchers, citizens: ~120; Trust improvement: >50%

5) Opening markets for AugmentCity/DTs.
Impact type: Market opportunity; Impact level: CREST will serve to test the scalability and repeatability of the DT methodology so establish a strong sustainable brand. The project will also allow further developing methodologies (gamification, behaviour change) for co-creation, thereby increase customer-retention and pilot-to-customer conversion.

CREST's free publications, resources and results are accessible online: crestproject.eu/resources/

The key innovative features CREST will bring into one single framework will be:
i) a ground-breaking platform to create and operate graphical DTs in the urban areas enabling more grounded and faster CC adaptation and resilience
ii) co-creation and stakeholder engagement practices.

CREST´s concept is revolutionary though, as engagement and co-creation will use the AugmentCity platform to create DT of neighbourhoods which local citizens can relate to, combining the powerful and engaging visualisation of urban areas with scenario of extreme adverse events in order to raise awareness and engage citizens and civil servants towards adaptation actions and capacity building.

The CREST project is an innovation action, including both applied and fundamental/basic R&I activities, and proposing a new collaborative model between the local and regional stakeholders - administrations, business, academia and the wide civil society – to co-create adaptation solutions. Bringing all stakeholders together in this co-evolutionary process to accelerate this societal transformation is a cornerstone of this proposal.

CREST´s innovation activities are centred around the AugmentCity digital twinning platform (TRL7). During the project, it will be brought to TRL9 through the participatory experimentation activities conducted in WP2. These will provide the DTs with an excellent framework for field testing in real /near operational environment.
Evaluation from the co-creation participants (including facilitators) will be gathered with a view to improving/adjusting the system functionalities (WP3).
Other scientific activities in the project will involve basic/applied research: elaboration of sustainability and climate resilience monitoring and impact assessment framework in WP1, and the engagement, capacity building and co-creation in WP2.
These latter mainly aim to discover how AR/VR technologies can be best used to engage and increase the capacity of the different audiences in the participatory exercises, how can such technologies best aid deliberation and support decision-making in climate related urban planning, what are the benefits of such technologies in engagement and co-creation, how much do such technologies improve participants´ understanding of CC impacts, and how much do they improve participatory decision-making. It is expected that this research will result in scientific publications. Its results will feed further research and potentially decision-making practices in local climate related urban planning.

Publications:
- State of the art compact report on regional climate strategies and challenges
- Citizen Science Research Protocol
- Impact and Monitoring Assessment Framework
- Delineation of metropolitan areas in Poland: a functional approach

Videos:
- Digital Twins illustrative use case: Kristiansund (NO)
- Digital Twins alpha version: Bordeaux (FR)
- Digital Twins alpha version: Kolobrzeg (PL)
- CREST project presentation