ERA-PLANET. SMURBS

SMURBS ultimate goal is to promote the "smart‐city" approach, serving the need for a common approach to enhance environmental and societal resilience to specific urban pressures, through the integration of EO. In view of this goal, its objectives are divided into 3 categories: a) Overarching, which target to the alignment with and exploitation of existing programmes, strategies, data, networks, services and goals, b) Vertical, which define the targeted urban pressures (air pollution, disasters, urban growth) and their reciprocal relations with health, migration and other inequalities, and c) Horizontal, to assure interoperability of the produced data and services within ERA‐PLANET and other infrastructures.

The overall ambition of SMURBS is to improve the quality of life of citizens and enhance cities' resilience with respect to air pollution and both natural and manmade disasters, through a chain of "smart urban solutions", that take into account existing rates of urban growth, long standing impacts like on health and newly rising pressures like migration. Existing smart‐cities or networks of them, do not fully exploit the capacities provided by EO, to deliver holistic approaches to modern environmental pressures. SMURBS main aspiration is to bring together a vast array of partners of a high degree of expertise in EO, pooling national resources, facilities and coordinating national/regional research programmes, cultivating exchange of know‐how and enforcing interdisciplinary action to overcome the currently fragmented status of EO under the common banner of the smart‐city concept.