Data Platform of Urban Environmental Quality for Sustainable and Resilient Cities under Future Climate Change (1 Dec 18 - 31 Dec 22)
• Researchers: NG Yan Yung, REN Chao, Kevin LAU, Steve YIM, Amos TAI
• Funding Amount: HK$10,000,000
• Funding source: CUHK Vice-Chancellor's One-off Discretionary Fund

Climate change causes a wide range of environmental impacts which affects the living quality of humans. In urban areas, vast urbanization exacerbates such impacts and leads to increasing vulnerability. To adequately and accurately assess the impacts of climate change on cities, urban environmental quality is of utmost importance since it affects urban liveability and the well-being of urban inhabitants. However, there is a lack of holistic assessment of urban environmental quality because of the limited availability of detailed data and the mismatch of spatial scales. It hampers the development of climate-responsive urban planning and hence the resilience of cities to future climate change. Urban planners and policy makers require information disseminated in the form that they can easily understand and use in their practices. In the proposed study, a data platform which incorporates urban morphological, meteorological, socio-economic and demographic data will be developed. Technical inputs will also be incorporated into the data platform for the assessment of urban environmental quality. The resultant platform can be applied at different spatial scales to suit the need of urban planning practices. Pilot applications will be completed to showcase the applicability of the data platform. In addition, data products developed from the World Urban Database Access Portal Tool (WUDAPT) will be used to provide input data for cities without detailed spatial data, particularly experiencing rapid urbanization. The resultant data platform can also be interfaced with other database for further investigations of urban issues. International collaborations will then be enhanced by extending current studies to consider future climate change and hence improve the liveability of urban areas.