Resilient Cities

WEO's Resilient Cities offering uses satellite imagery and AI to map impermeable surfaces, monitor urban land cover change and detect urban heat patterns to support planning and climate adaptation. The service combines globally available open satellite data (including Copernicus Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3) with locally trained machine and deep learning models and, where available, local aerial orthophotos. It produces high-resolution derived layers, such as 1-metre sealed-surface maps, with seasonal or annual updates.

Outputs include impermeability maps, urban heat island indicators, tree cover and health assessments, green roof and blue-green infrastructure monitoring, and change detection over time. Cities and municipalities use them to design interventions for water cycle restoration, flood risk reduction and heat mitigation. The processing pipeline is hosted on AWS, and the product is aimed at non-technical users such as city planners, arborists, developers and municipal governments. WEO reports TRL 9, with the service rolled out to more than 10 cities and other clients in Belgium and Luxembourg, including Brussels, Luxembourg City, Gent, Dudelange and Esch, and developed with ESA Space Solutions support. For Brussels Environment, WEO's sealed-surface map reached an F-score of 0.92, against 0.86 for the previous map.