The Environmental Performance and Sustainable Development of Cities: EU Tools with Potential for Global Application

The European Commission has a number of initiatives and tools under development for promoting sustainable urban development in the EU – tools that could be adapted, or used directly, by non-EU cities, for promoting the Global urban agenda. This networking event, to be introduced by the Deputy Director General of DG Environment of the European Commission, will present and discuss these, with the aim of sharing EU know-how with those attending the Habitat III conference. 
The first item to be presented and discussed will be a new Green City Tool that has been developed to help cities in taking the first steps towards becoming more sustainable. The tool allows cities to measure and then benchmark their performance against other similar cities, against a set of key indicators; and to share experiences and learn from the approaches others have taken. 
Next up, the Global Human Settlement layer will be presented and demonstrated. Available free online, it can be used by countries and cities around the world to measure and monitor urban sprawl in and around cities over time. The tool uses European satellite data to detect buildings across the planet, to provide a unique insight into how cities are growing and developing. By combining the Global Human Settlement data with population data, a global population grid has been created that can be used to define cities, detect vulnerabilities to natural disasters and for transport planning.
Finally, The European Cities Report and the European Urban Data Platform will be introduced, giving a comprehensive account of the development of European cities over recent years, along with a description of how European cities are dealing with issues such as air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. How this wide array of EU city data coming from the report can be accessed via interactive visualisations will also be shown.