Climate Resilient Urban Simulation Tool

Sustainable urban growth requires adequate planning. The current urban footprint and its potential future growth are important factors that affect a city’s ability to become sustainable and improve the quality of life of its citizens. The climate resilient urban simulation tool (CRUST) combines open access multitemporal Landsat and Sentinel satellite imagery with volunteered geographic information data to generate automated urban growth and land use inventories which can be further enriched with local data. The tool helps facilitate the analysis of visually and spatially-explicit scenarios of future urban growth that allows urban planners and policy-makers to estimate the future land needs, infrastructure costs, vulnerability profiles and greenhouse gas emissions associated with different options. The simulation framework integrates climate resilience focusing on floods, conservation planning and compact growth to help land use planners to create best use of land plans. It allows policymakers to identify future hotspots of development where infrastructure provision is a priority and vulnerable areas which need to be protected from future growth