Climate Change Adaptation in the heritage City of Salamanca (Es): Ecosystem Services, Green Infrastructure and Big Data (LIFE VIA DE LA PLATA)

Climate change is seriously impacting the historical centres of Spanish cities. Solutions need policies and adaptation plans that integrate a top-down perspective, focusing on the global problem to define physical vulnerability, with a bottom-up approach, assessing the specific threats and adaptive capacity of specific cities.

The main objective of the LIFE VIA DE LA PLATA project is to create an adaptation model for climate change in Salamanca, a world heritage city in Spain, through the construction of Green Infrastructure and the improvement of Ecosystem Services. The project also contemplates the monitoring of all these aspects with Ecosystem Services Control and Monitoring stations, based on sensors, IoT, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. 

Six pilot areas are present where nature-based solutions (NBS) will be applied to recover up to 49 different ecosystem services, ranging from aspects such as food supply, climate regulation or noise reduction, to the regulation of air quality or leisure and environmental education. The project aims to transfer their results for possible replication in 15 other heritage cities in Spain and 40 elsewhere in Europe.