The UMEX-HOPE project aims to explore the intricate relationships between urban microclimates, ecosystem health, and associated human health risks. By adopting a One Health approach, integrating environmental, human, and animal health, the project seeks to better understand how urban climate adaptation measures (e.g., green infrastructure) may have both positive and negative impacts on health and well-being. A key focus is on identifying “risk zones” where extreme micro-climatic conditions (e.g., heat, pollution, allergens) or disease vectors may pose significant threats to human health. Urban-rural gradients and trade-offs will be taken into account in the analysis. UMEX-HOPE will use the Hannover and Braunschweig regions to address the following key research questions:
Funding body: Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Funding programme: zukunft.niedersachsen
Duration: 2025-2031
ReSpace! advances an integrated understanding of how spatial infrastructures and typologies can be transformed for climate adaptation – addressing climate change, resource constraints and societal demands in the complex interplay of global and local impacts. Building on cross-disciplinary collaboration between architecture and urban design, the humanities, social and natural sciences, and engineering, we will co-design, narrate, simulate, and evaluate innovative solutions for future sustainable living.
This project develops a hybrid modelling approach combining observational data, process-based models, and machine learning to quantify the effects of blue, green, and grey infrastructure (BGGI) on urban climate adaptation and mitigation. It investigates how BGGI performance varies across urban typologies and explores trade-offs and synergies, including links to environmental justice based on socio-economic data.
Funding body: Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Funding programme: zukunft.niedersachsen Ecoversity
Duration: 2025-2028
Increasing urban vegetation cover is seen as an important climate change adaptation strategy, both because of (1) the potential to sequester atmospheric CO2 and (2) the increased evaporative cooling and positive effect on the urban water cycle.
Greening of buildings, i.e., vegetated parts of buildings such as roofs and facades, represents an important part of urban green infrastructure. However, the potential of carbon sequestration is one of the ecosystem services of green buildings that has been poorly studied due to its complex exchange conditions as well as lack of data availability. GREENVELOPES seeks to fill this research gap through detailed measurements and process-based modeling to investigate the performance of green buildings in terms of their carbon and water exchange with the urban atmosphere. The research objectives will be addressed using micrometeorological flux measurements and leaf-level gas exchange measurements. Furthermore, an existing urban energy balance model will be extended by the process-based simulation of carbon and water exchange with the urban atmosphere (Meteo France).
Finally, using the examples of Toulouse (France) and Berlin (Germany), the model-based 'upscaling' of exchange processes from the building scale to the urban scale will allow quantifying and evaluating the potentials of green buildings in terms of carbon sequestration and evaporative cooling compared to other types of green infrastructure.
Cooperation: Bilateral project in collaboration with Cécile de Munck (National Centre for Meteorological Research - Meteo France).
Funding body: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Duration: 03/2023 – 02/2026
Joint project in cooperation with the City of Braunschweig (Department of Environmental Protection) and the working groups Environmental Systems Analysis & Landscape Ecology, Soil Science & Soil Physics of the Institute of Geoecology (TU Braunschweig) and the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism (TU Braunschweig).
The aim of the COABS project is to analyse climate risks in Braunschweig, develop measures to increase adaptive capacity and initiate their implementation. The end result is the development of building blocks for a city-wide adaptation strategy as well as adaptation measures in the fields of action "water quantity management & soil balance", "people & health" and "nature conservation & biodiversity".
Funding: Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz, nukleare Sicherheit und Verbraucherschutz (BMUV)
Funding code: 67DAS246B
Funding programme: „Maßnahmen zur Anpassung an den Klimawandel“ https://www.bmuv.de/themen/klimaschutz-anpassung/klimaanpassung
Project management: ZUG https://www.z-u-g.org/aufgaben/foerderung-von-massnah-men-zur-anpassung-an-die-folgen-des-klimawandels/
Duration: 2022-2025
The project objective is to investigate the influence of emissions from Berlin's major airports on the spatial distribution of UFP and other pollutants (soot, NO2, PM10 and PM2.5) and their contribution to outdoor air concentrations by means of stationary and mobile field measurements and model calculations.
Funding body: German Federal Environmental Agency (UBA)
Duration: 2020-2024
We are researching green roofs at several locations within Germany (Berlin, Braunschweig, Obernburg/Main) regarding the exchange processes of energy and CO2 between the green roof and the atmosphere. On two large green roofs of 7,000 and 70,000 m² at the Berlin and Obernburg sites, respectively, we are currently using the Eddy covariance method to quantify the turbulent fluxes of heat, water vapour and CO2 in high temporal resolution and to better understand the exchange processes in the green roof ecosystem.
Funding body: internal funding
Duration: 2014-continuously