Spotlight on nature-based solution: CoolCity
Heat waves, urban droughts, local flooding, and the urban heat island effect are intensifying across Europe, and the quality of life for city residents is suffering as a result. European cities need up-to-date knowledge and shared tools to build climate resilience with awareness. COOLCITY, developed by Polish remote sensing specialist MGGP Aero and a consortium of partners through the LIFE COOLCITY project, is working to deliver exactly that.
At the centre of the system is the COOLCITY Index, an integrated indicator measuring the condition of cities' blue-green infrastructure and their adaptive potential, built around five adaptation challenges: surface permeability, vegetation state, biodiversity, water conditions and thermal conditions. The Index, freely available to all EU cities, scores over 11,000 urban areas on a scale of 0–10 and is updated annually, enabling cities to measure, compare, and track their progress in a consistent way for the first time.
Alongside the free Index, COOLCITY offers two commercial tools for local governments. COOLCITY View is a strategic tool for cities at the beginning of their adaptation journey, providing a spatially differentiated diagnosis of the city, identifying valuable natural assets and priority intervention areas, and offering directional recommendations as a starting point for urban planning and adaptation strategies. COOLCITY Design is a more advanced decision-support system built on a detailed inventory of the entire city, with a catalogue of 20+ nature-based solutions, scenario modelling for NBS implementation, cost estimation, and forecasts of ecosystem service growth valued through a choice-experiment study among residents.
The COOLCITY team's ambition is for the system to become the European standard for digital climate adaptation support, a shared framework spanning blue-green infrastructure inventory, valuation, planning, decision-making, implementation, and monitoring. With its alignment to the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy, the Nature Restoration Law, and the Mission "100 Climate-Neutral Cities," COOLCITY is positioned to support European cities preparing Urban Adaptation Plans through 2030 and beyond. By combining reliable data, proven methodology, and expert knowledge, COOLCITY helps cities move from problem awareness to effective action — at the scale of Europe, and that of a single street.
The LIFE COOLCITY project (2023–2029) is co-financed by the EU LIFE programme and Poland's National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management. Consortium leader: MGGP Aero. Partners: University of Warsaw, University of Łódź, Sieker, City of Wrocław.