Pärnu is a coastal city by the Baltic Sea that frequently experiences flooding. Extreme weather events, storms and rising sea levels often disrupt transportation inside the city and with surrounding areas. The main challenge is to know which roads remain open and accessible during floods to secure safety, emergency response and the continuity of vital services.
Our core challenge lies in the lack of resilience to natural hazards, specifically the escalating risk of flooding in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This threat was dramatically highlighted by the over 5-meter flood in May-June 2024, which overwhelmed the city and impacted 46 out of 96 neighbourhoods, affecting roughly 157,000 people, which corresponds to 11% of residents. Porto Alegre is the capital and the largest city of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city was isolated for days due to transportation infrastructure collapse, causing risks of shortages of potable water, food, and medication for hospitals. The central problem is a profound communication and engagement failure, leading to thousands needing rescue by helicopters, boats or water motorbikes because they didn’t heed civil defence warnings, often due to the difficulty in interpreting simple data and the absence of smart community mechanisms. This challenge extends to operations: the lack of real-time, two-way, and unified situational awareness severely hinders the ability to dynamically map danger zones, locate people in need, and coordinate official agents and volunteers during the critical logistics of rescue and resource management.
The main challenge is the transformation of the territory from an area with high hydrogeological risk to a fully resilient and safe urban and peri-urban ecosystem, capable of coexisting with increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events. Castenaso directly borders the metropolitan city of Bologna (in addition to the cities of San Lazzaro di Savena, Granarolo dell’Emilia, Ozzano dell’Emilia, and Budrio). The specific challenge, shared with the Bolognese territory, is the mitigation of the flooding risk of the Idice torrent and its smaller tributaries, which cross and define the territory. The collapse of the Pedagna Bridge and the numerous levee breaches demonstrate structural fragility and the need for integrated interventions along the riverbed, involving the maintenance of in-stream vegetation and the restoration/reinforcement of riverbank defenses, in coordination with neighboring municipalities and the Basin Authority.
Due to climate change, extreme rainfall events and flash floods have become more frequent and severe, threatening urban safety, infrastructure, and quality of life. In Isbak, heavy rainfall often overwhelms outdated drainage systems, causing water to flood streets, disrupt transportation, damage homes, and endanger lives. Cities across Northern Europe, including Helsinki, Tallinn, and Stockholm, face similar issues as climate change alters precipitation patterns. Urban areas must evolve from reactive flood response to predictive, data-driven, and resilient flood management.
Burgas is a coastal city that faces growing exposure to extreme rainfall, flash floods, and seasonal forest fires. The municipality already operates a flood-monitoring system and is in the process of developing a complementary fire-monitoring network, which includes strategically placed smoke detectors in high-risk zones. However, as detection capacity expands, a critical gap persists in the “last mile” of communication. Citizens still lack fast, reliable, and inclusive access to information on current conditions, potential risks, and appropriate responses in different situations. Without continuous and preventive communication, monitoring data cannot help residents prepare in advance or reduce their vulnerability. The problem is especially acute in remote and peri-urban neighborhoods with limited connectivity, where residents are least likely to receive timely updates through web platforms or mobile applications. The challenge, therefore, extends beyond technical detection to ensuring that risk signals are translated into clear, accessible, and multilingual information disseminated through multiple channels—such as SMS or cell broadcast, public displays, and municipal kiosks—so that all citizens, whether online or offline, are reached. This issue is common to many medium-sized European cities, positioning Burgas as an ideal pilot site to demonstrate a scalable model for transforming monitoring data into effective tools for public awareness and preparedness.
Saaremaa is increasingly facing challenges related to natural disasters – such as storms, severe winter conditions, flooding -as well as power outages, cyberattacks, and occasional social unrest. These events can disrupt essential systems, including electricity, heating, and communication, thereby disrupting the daily life and essential services for residents as well as visitors.
The global geopolitical situation and increasing security risks have shown the need for cities to develop stronger civil protection systems. Jelgava currently lacks accessible and modern temporary shelter infrastructure for its residents. In the event of sudden threats citizens have no easily accessible, designated places to stay safe for several hours until danger has passed.
The challenge is to provide short-term, safe, and distributed shelters across the city, which would be close to people in their everyday life and not require large-scale relocation. The idea is to create dual-use infrastructure – for example, strengthened bus stops or other public spaces that are normally used daily, but could quickly serve as protective shelters in emergencies.
Ataşehir is a densely populated district of Istanbul, located in one of the world’s most seismically active zones. The imminent earthquake risk presents a significant threat to public safety, urban infrastructure, and social cohesion. While the scientific community has produced risk maps and scenario studies, there is a lack of localized, citizen-engaged risk mapping and preparedness planning. This gap prevents residents from fully understanding the vulnerabilities of their neighborhoods, and hinders proactive measures by both local authorities and citizens.
As one of Istanbul’s most densely populated districts, Bağcılar is highly vulnerable to disasters such as potential earthquakes, floods, or industrial accidents. Our current disaster response plans are largely static and reactive, meaning they are activated after a disaster occurs. However, the chaos that would ensue during a disaster (collapsed roads, communication breakdowns, instant population movements) could quickly render these static plans ineffective. Our fundamental challenge is the inability to manage our limited resources (fire brigades, ambulances, search-and-rescue teams, construction equipment) in the most efficient way during and immediately after a disaster, and to provide our citizens with instant, accurate, and life-saving information.
Istanbul is highly vulnerable to a major earthquake due to its dense urban structure and large population, which makes the city particularly fragile. In the first phase of the Disaster-Focused Digital Twin Project, the goal is to identify collapsed or damaged buildings using satellite imagery. This will provide a real-time map of areas most in need of urgent intervention.
In the second phase, the challenge is to ensure the most effective deployment of search and rescue teams and vehicles to these areas. This is a highly dynamic problem because teams vary in size, capacity, skills, location, and available equipment. After the initial earthquake, new teams, including local, international, and volunteer units, may join the system, while exhausted teams may be withdrawn. Aftershocks can also lead to additional building collapses, requiring continuous reassignment of resources. Efficiently coordinating all these factors under rapidly changing conditions is a complex logistical challenge.
