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Covenant of Mayors - Europe

Leveraging Open Satellite Data for the management and planning of Milan

Milan, Italy

The Municipality of Milan fosters innovative policies and programmes to improve citizens’ life-quality through new integrated solutions. Within the SPOTTED project, Milan has developed a platform capable of analysing the green index, heat exposure, and heat wave risk in urban areas and/or objects (e.g. schools, nursing homes, etc) to support the city’s management and planning towards the general objective of adaptation to climate change.

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Earth Observation
Adaptation

The SPOTTED Project

Context of the project and its development

The SPOTTED project aims at contributing to the 'Milano 2030' strategy for a green, liveable, and resilient city. In particular, the project's main objective was to develop a digital platform combining satellite Open Data with other open data, such as statistical ones. The platform could thus provide urban data-driven analyses to support urban management, planning, and monitoring with a particular focus on natural capital and its impact on citizens’ wellbeing. 

Accordingly, three SPOTTED digital services have been co-designed with the other two pilot cities, Helsinki and Naples, and collaboratively developed with the technological teams (Engineering, Latitudo 40, Fiware, PlanetGis Sky). Such digital services elaborate thematic maps and associated datasets about:

  1. Urban Green Index
  2. Urban Heat Exposure
  3. Urban Heat wave risk.

Several insights have been produced by the City of Milan, based on the SPOTTED platform’s analyses listed below, to support the planning and monitoring of green transformation initiatives, as well as to inform the prioritisation of interventions:

  1. Urban Green Index (UGI) in districts
  2. UGI in census sections
  3. Heat in districts
  4. Heat in census sections
  5. Heat on bike paths
  6. Heat on post offices
  7. Heat on kindergartens
  8. Heat on primary schools
  9. Heat on secondary schools
  10. Heat risk to districts
  11. Heat risk to census sections.

Examples of the insights produced by the SPOTTED platform

Stakeholders engaged

In addition to the Technological and Digital Innovation (ITED) municipal department, which has been leading the project since the project kick-off in September 2021, many other key stakeholders have been engaged in the SPOTTED project. A Pilot Local Group was created for co-designing and testing the SPOTTED digital services and including both internal and external representatives from:

  • The Green and Environment municipal department
  • The Housing municipal department
  • The Metropolitan City of Milan
  • The Agency for Mobility, Environment, and Territory (AMAT)
  • The Regional Agency for Environmental Protection (ARPA)
  • The University “Politecnico di Milano” with a representation from three different departments:
    • Department of Energy
    • Department of Architecture and Urban Studies
    • Department of Electronics, Information Science, and Bioengineering.
  • The FORESTAMI project.

Challenges

One of the challenges being faced along the SPOTTED project has been both the availability of open data as well as the associated granularity that needed to be adequately aligned with the expected analyses and outcomes. The assessment of the datasets available within the city open data portal has been a key step of the service design phase. Also, given that the calculation performed for elaborating the SPOTTED analyses has a medium granularity (10x10 meters), another challenge has been related to achieving a sufficient outcomes’ level of detail able to support civil servants and policy makers in their urban management and planning activities.

Nonetheless, if one thinks that both the platform’s input and output are entirely based on open data, the cost-saving is significant (even in the long-term perspective as it is fully replicable). If one also thinks about the geographic scalability of the project, it is a global cost-saving, even for other cities. The evolution of this project is indeed linked to the evolution of data sources.

Lessons learnt and next steps

The SPOTTED outcomes can be used by the City of Milan to support various climate-related actions and strategic plans, especially contributing to:

  • Urban management, monitoring, and planning related to the city’s goal of climate adaptation set for 2050 within the ‘Piano Aria Clima / Air and Climate Plan’ (PAC), and
  • The biannual PAC monitoring.

Zooming into the PAC, SPOTTED digital services are planned to be used to monitor the three urban indicators of green index, heat islands (UHI), and heat-wave risk. Accordingly, Milan is also foreseeing to make use of the SPOTTED platform and the related datasets as a supporting tool to identify:

  1. Districts with higher heat risk,
  2. Census sections with greater UHI effect (within the high heat risk urban district boundaries),
  3. Potential intervention areas to be “vegetated” to meet the climate adaptation goals.

Milan Key Figures

  • Population: 1.358.420 (ISTAT,2023)
  • Area: 181,63 km2 (ISTAT,2023)

Covenant Figures

  • Signatory to the Covenant of Mayors since: 2008  
  • Emission reduction ambitions:
    • % GHG emissions reductions by 2030: 45%
    • Carbon neutral by 2050

Financing the project

The City of Milan had a budget of €174, 624 (total budget cost) for the SPOTTED project.

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