Wolfgang Loibl

• Mag., Dr., MSc.
• Head of Department at Austrian Institute of Technology

The paper discusses interrelations of urban densification and urban climate under global warming conditions by means of microclimate simulations as well as urban densification scenarios, referring to two research projects exploring test areas in Vienna and Linz, Austria. The impact of the extension of building heights on microclimate in densely urb...

Climate adaptation, mitigation, and protecting strategies are becoming even more important as climate change is intensifying. The impacts of climate change are especially tangible in dense urban areas due to the inherent characteristics of urban structure and materiality. To assess impacts of densification on urban climate and potential adaptation...

In recent years, the representation of climate information in a way to support decision making has been gaining momentum. Worldwide, these so-called climate services are emerging as an essential tool to connect the advances in climate science with the domains of climate change adaptation. The methodology developed within the CLARITY project (funded...

Impact assessment is a crucial basis for decision-making. Characterization and comparison of projects, identifying objectives and indicators for the justification and comparison of alternatives represent essential elements of any impact assessment. Comparing alternatives against a set of objectives and criteria addresses different impact types, und...

Ongoing urbanization worldwide present a big challenge for the quality of urban life. This development poses great challenges for cities due to the growing demand for more living space and supporting infrastructure, resulting in environmental pollution, higher anthropogenic waste heat and poor outdoor thermal comfort. To accommodate this rapid expa...

Landslides are recorded especially when economic damage has been caused, which is mostly the case in settled areas, along transportation infrastructure, or on agricultural land. However, recent LiDAR-derived inventories often show a surprisingly high landslide density particularly in forested areas. This apparent contradiction underlines the need t...

Global increase of urban population has brought about a growing demand for more dwelling space, resulting in various negative impacts, such as accelerated urbanization, urban sprawl and higher carbon footprints. To cope with these growth dynamics, city authorities are urged to consider alternative planning strategies aiming at mitigating the negati...

Research in the ongoing ILLAS project (Integrating Land use Legacies in Landslide Risk Assessment to support Spatial Planning), funded by the Austrian Climate Research Program (ACRP), focuses on the possible effect of land-use legacies on landslide occurrences. Landslides are recorded especially when economic damage has been caused, which is mostly...

This chapter describes ICT solutions for planning, maintaining and assessing urban energy systems. There is no single urban energy system, but – like the city itself – a system of sub-systems with different scales, spatially ranging from buildings to blocks, districts and to the city, temporally ranging from real time data to hourly, daily, monthly...

This chapter describes ICT solutions for planning, maintaining and assessing urban energy systems. There is no single urban energy system, but - like the city itself - a system of sub-systems with different scales, spatially ranging from buildings to blocks, districts and to the city, temporally ranging from real time data to hourly, daily, monthly...

This paper investigates the extent to which a mobile data source can be utilised to generate new information intelligence for decision-making in smart city planning processes. In this regard, the Mobility Explorer framework is introduced and applied to the City of Vienna (Austria) by using anonymised mobile phone data from a mobile phone service pr...

THe presentation conissts of 3 parts In the inroduction urban development is descibed s Response to policy decisions, the 2nd part describes the model concept to siulate populatoin Response - an Agent based model where agents reactoin on attractiveness pattern within a City the 3rd part describes tool applicatin and results: growth growth scenarios...

This paper deals with climate change mitigation and addresses waste heat reuse as a measure which is until now considered only to a limited extent. The City of Vienna serves as a case study to explore potentials to improve the urban heat supply using waste heat as an additional energy source. As no observation data about waste heat and detailed hea...

Urban fabric types and microclimate response – assessment and design improvement. Final Report. TU Wien, 2014.

The successful implementation of urban energy planning strategies (applied as a set of measures to improve energy efficiency and enhance renewable energy generation to reduce CO2 emissions) depends on the satisfaction of the stakeholders, involved in future implementation process. This article presents a stakeholder-oriented approach, implemented i...

Modelers of urban systems are confronted with an enormous complexity, plurality, and multidisciplinarity of the components these urban systems are made of. Despite the existence of a large variety of modeling approaches and techniques—primarily trying to simplify the apparent complexity—data unavailability presents a common factor for partial failu...

This chapter presents two approaches of gathering data to serve as input for an urban decision support system that, using Agent-based Modeling, is meant to simulate urban development based on people’s movement within a selected urban region. The two approaches presented are, first, a traditional one using static data from the past and, second, a re...

Energy strategies are needed at a city level and consequently, adequate planning tools are required to support urban energy planners in assessing their decisions (e.g. which buildings are the best to refurbish). This paper presents an ontology based approach for urban energy planning support. The approach is applied to develop a planning support sy...

The successful implementation of urban energy planning strategies (applied as a set of measures to improve energy efficiency and carry out distributed renewable energy generation to reduce CO2 emissions) depends on the satisfaction of the stakeholders, involved in future implementation process. This paper presents a stakeholder-oriented approach, i...

Abstract:: Urban growth is a challenge for cities all over the world which calls for instruments to foster sustainable urban development. Urban development is triggered by dwelling behavior of the cities’ today’s residents and future residents from outside the urban region, targeting the city as future living and working area. Influencing this beha...

Socio-economic pathways determine future climate impacts and costs thereof. Pragmatically, we have referred to a global reference socio-economic pathway (represented by SSP2 in the IPCC process) and derived figures for the core economic, demographic, land-use and (qualitatively) technological development in Austria, which again frame the sectoral d...

Expansion of urban green is triggered by settlement growth that preserves appropriate urban green shares and—potentially—by explicit policy to counter local temperature increase in urban environments in the future. Both issues are considered here. Green space expansion because of urban growth in Austria’s six larger cities is assumed to reach 144 h...

- Develops a consistent framework for the economic evaluation of climate change impacts, acknowledging mutual interaction and macroeconomic feedbacks - Provides a uniform tool box for economic climate impact evaluation at national level - Application to the case of Austria This volume deals with the multifaceted and interdependent impacts of clima...

While energy savings in buildings is among the key prerequisites for a low-carbon future, our ability to maintain temperatures in buildings within a specific comfort range, and thus our demand for heating and cooling energy, are also highly sensitive to climate change. We quantify two main impact chains: (1) a higher temperature in winter leads to...

This chapter describes ICT solutions for planning, maintaining and assessing urban energy systems. There is no single urban energy system, but - like the city itself - a system of sub-systems with different scales, spatially ranging from buildings to blocks, districts and to the city, temporally ranging from real time data to hourly, daily, monthly...

The European Landscape Convention implies a requirement for signatory states to identify their urban landscapes which goes beyond the traditional focus on individual parks and green spaces and the links between them. Landscape ecological approaches can provide a useful model for identifying urban landscape types across a whole territory, but the va...

Over the past years, the governance of cities is increasingly supported by the application of smart city solutions, based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools and methodologies that provide an effective basis for the assessment of urban complexity, decision-making support, and the creation of robust solutions. In this context the...

Fis chapter focuses on the needs and opportunities as well as the constraints and barriers with respect to mitigation and adaptation to climate change. While the chapter concentrates mainly on Austria, information is provided on the global and EU level to the extent they are relevant for Austria. Section 1.1 discusses the targets already speci8ed f...

The Austrian Assessment Report 2014 (AAR14) is based on the IPCC structure and process; it consists of three volumes that present the existing knowledge on climate change in Austria, and on the needs and possibilities for mitigation and adaptation. The report aims to present the scientific knowledge pertaining to Austria in a coherent and complete...

This paper presents the results of a research project involving a new urban development project in the city of Vienna. Given the expected long life-cycle of this project, the developers requested scientifically-based information concerning the projected extent of the microclimatic changes in the development area and their potential ramifications fo...

Using an existing decision support system in different data availability situations is a challenge. This is due to the significant variance in terms of what data can be acquired as input for such systems. In urban energy planning, the problem of data availability is even more crucial because of the large amount of data that is required. This proble...

The paper discusses experiences of development and implementation of public motion explorer (PME) tool as part of the EU FP7 project urbanAPI. This tool has been applied to three EU cities with the objective to investigate population distribution dynamics and anonymous population movement patterns within urban environments as an instrument to map s...

1 ABSTRACT Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change; they are also the chosen living environment of a significant majority of Europe's population. Global warming increasingly influences the urban climate and affects the future health and well-being of the urban population. The urban climate is mainly influenced by th...

1 ABSTRACT The Urban Development Simulator is currently under development within the FP7 EU project urbanAPI (2011-2014). The simulation tool is developed for the city of Ruse in remote northern Bulgaria at the Romanian border as a support for the local urban planners and politicians to evaluate high level planning decisions defined as use cases. T...

The contribution deals with the decision support tool developed within the EU FP7 TRANSFORM project, a collaboration of varoiuous partners including 6 cities (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Genova, Hamburg, Lyon and Vienna) aiming to achieve a significant progress in the transformation towards Smart Cities. The project rests on three main pillars: the deve...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present the effectiveness of participatory information and communication technology (ICT) tools for urban planning, in particular, supporting bottom-up decision-making in urban management and governance. Design/methodology/approach – This work begins with a presentation on the state of the art literature on th...

A simulation study reveals how open space design may mitigate local urban heat island effects.

An important driving force behind urban expansion is the growth of the urban population. But for Europe, this is not a sufficient explanation. The major trend is that European cities have become much less compact. Since the mid-1950s European cities have expanded on average by 78%, whereas the population has grown by only 33%. In the PLUREL project...

The chapter introduces the peri-urban as a specific morphological type and explores the different dimensions of its dynamics. Scenarios for future possible development directions were also explored. This peri-urban zone is intimately associated with the transition from a completely urban structure to that of a rural nature and since it also involve...

The potential distribution and composition rate of beech, sessile oak and Turkey oak were investigated for present and future climates (2036-2065 and 2071-2100) in Hungary. Membership functions were defined using the current composition rate (percentage of cover in forest compartments) of the tree species and the long-term climate expressed by the...

For assessing the social dimension of vulnerability, population exposure mapping is usually considered the essential starting point. Integration of social structure then further differentiates situation-specific vulnerability patterns on a local scale. Census data available in heterogeneous spatial reference units are still considered the standard...

The assessment of regional climate change impacts combined with the sensitivity of landscape functions by predictive modelling of hazardous landscape processes is a new fundamental field of research. In particular, this study investigates the effects of changing weather extremes on meso-regional-scale landscape vulnerability. Climatic-exposure para...

Peri-urban agriculture in metropolitan regions is exposed to severe urbanisation pressures related to land and labour availability, thus limiting farming activities. Nevertheless, peri-urban agriculture reveals specific characteristics that contribute to the local food supply and the management of a multifunctional countryside near towns. This pape...

Gathering and managing requirements from stakeholders is an essential task for the successful development of IT tools for any application domain. However, specifying stakeholders' requirements for a collaborative research and development project in the urban management domain is especially challenging. The reason for this is that stakeholders are d...

Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet die Rolle der Wissenschaft für eine vorsorgende Gesellschaft anhand zweier konkreter Projekte – anhand des nationalen Projekts „future.scapes“ und des EU-Projekts „PLUREL“. Beide Projekte befassen sich mit nachhaltiger regionaler Entwicklung und beide stehen exemplarisch für den Anspruch, wissenschaftliche Forschung expliz...

Vulnerability describing the status of a society with respect to an imposed hazard or potential impact is considered a strongly multidisciplinary concept. A central objective of vulnerability assessment is to provide indications where and how people – and more specifically, what kind of people – might be affected by a certain impact. For assessment...

Crisis and disaster management is much more than the immediate first-response actions following an incident. In many projects the main focus has been on the phase starting at the point when an unwanted event happens and lasting until the activities return to normal routines (i.e., ad hoc reaction rather than proactive mitigation). There has been le...

Mit der Gründung des Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) haben Schlüsselinstitu tionen der österreichischen Klimaforschung einen Fahrplan vorge legt, wie die nationale Klimaforschung gefördert und koordiniert werden sollte. Mit seinen Organisationseinheiten will das CCCA praxisorientiertes Wissen bereitstellen und Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentl...

In the context of disaster risk management and in particular for exposure and impact assessments modeling, input data quality, both in terms of the degree of spatial and thematic accuracy and reliability, is one of the most important factors. Especially in an urban setting, mapping and analysis of population exposure is crucial for the assessment o...

This paper discusses the application of mobile phone data for exploring the time-dependent population distribution and motion patterns, by detecting the dynamics within these changing distributions. Such pattern explorations make use of the mobile phone location information as proxy for personal location information. Activity and motion exploration...

For assessment of the social dimension of vulnerability, population exposure mapping forms an important part and is usually considered the starting point. Integration of social structure would then further differentiate situation-specific vulnerability patterns on a local scale. Census data available in inhomogeneous spatial reference units are sti...

As climate change appears, strategies and actions will be necessary to cope with its effects on environment and society in the coming decades. Current climate conditions can be observed everywhere in the world but future climate conditions can only be estimated through climate simulations which produce huge amounts of quantitative data. This data l...

Climate sensitive urban planning and building design require detailed information on effects of a changing climate. To simulate thermal building performance appropriate data are required as “standardized weather files”. But as historic weather records cannot be used to model building performance for future climate, synthetic “future weather” data a...

This paper presents the results of a recent research effort involving an actual urban development project for the city of Vienna. The project developers requested scientifically-based information concerning future microclimatic changes in the development area and their potential ramifications for the thermal performance of the projected buildings....

Landscape and Urban Planning j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / l a n d u r b p l a n a b s t r a c t Climate change amongst others is considered as a major threat to biodiversity. The aim of the present study was to assess the potential impact and regional variation of modelled climate change on selecte...

Spatial planning is considered to be one of the main instruments available to govern adaptation to climate change and climate change impacts in spatial contexts. To meet this challenge spatial planning authorities require information concerning climate change impacts on a regional and local scale level. This paper presents an assessment framework f...

The article discusses the participatory elaboration of strategies for sustainable regional development in an Alpine tourist region in Austria to cope with global change effects evolving locally, considering climate change, economic change as well as (local) societal change. Local stakeholders in an Alpine village in the Montafon region contributed...

To achieve public awareness and thorough understanding about expected climate changes and their future implications, ways have to be found to communicate model outputs to the public in a scientifically sound and easily understandable way. The newly developed Climate Twins tool tries to fulfil these requirements via an intuitively usable web applica...

Reclip:century (Research for Climate Protection: Century Model Runs) is a national climate simulation project aiming to deliver a range of climate simulations to provide scientifically sound data sets for the entire Greater Alpine Region, to be applied by the Austrian climate change impact research community. The simulation runs are carried out by...

Der letzte Bericht des Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) erläutert die weltweiten Auswirkungen des Klimawandels deutlich – allerdings aus globaler Sicht. Um zu klären wie sich das regionale Klima in Österreich verändern wird, wurde mit dem Projekt „reclip:more“ (Research for Climate Protection: Model Run Evaluation) eine erste k...

Die Wiener Bevölkerung erlebt – wie in vielen Städten – einen erheblichen sozioöko-nomischen und demographischen Wandel. Laut Prognosen der Statistik Austria wird Wien von einer zweifachen Veränderung betroff en sein: Einerseits wird für die nächsten Jahrzehnte eine Zuwanderung erwartet, die eine höhere Geburtenrate und eine Verjüngung der Bevölker...

Different strategies and actions will be necessary to cope with climate change effects on environment and society in the coming decades. Adaptation strategies are today related to climate model results, which deliver quantitative information about climate change effects. But model result interpretations like "temperature increase is expected to exc...

LaND USE CHaNgE IN aUSTRIa. RECENT DEvELOPmENTS aND FUTURE TRENDS Settlement growth and infrastructure expansion as well as the continuous conversion of former agricultural areas into forest areas represent the most significant trends in Austrian land use change. In particular, settlement growth, which daily consumes 10-12 ha of open space for buil...

Recent uneven land use dynamics in urban areas resulting from demographic change, economic pressure and the cities' mutual competition in a globalising world challenge both scientists and practitioners, among them social scientists, modellers and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment, the requir...

Zusammenfassung des Zwischenberichts zu den räumlichen Wirkfolgen von Klimaänderungen und ihrer raumordnerischen Relevanz Herausgeber Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung (BMVBS) Invalidenstraße 44 10115 Berlin Bundesamt für Baumwesen und Raumordnung (BBR) Deichmanns Aue 31-37 53179 Bonn Impressum Bearbeitung Technische Universit...

SENSOR is dependent on sufficient reliable and accurate data that have to be provided and shared by the partners within the project. Access to reliable and harmonised data across Europe is a fundamental precondition for realisation of the SENSOR project. The current chapter describes basics concerning geo-spatial data types and formats, system arch...

The objective of the geoland is to develop and demonstrate reliable, affordable and cost efficient European geo-information services, supporting the implementation of European directives and their national, regional and local implementation, as well as European and international policies. The observatory for spatial planning (OSP) generates product...

In contrast to typical urban regions, dominated by a core city located in the region's centre and a suburban fringe, the Austrian Rhine Valley, selected as study area, can be described as a peri-urban region with some medium-sized centres and various rural villages all developing in different ways. Thus, a simulation approach has to be applied that...

FBK-Aktivitäten in den Schulen Im Rahmen der Forschungs-BildungsKooperation wurden in den drei Teilregionen Kinder aus den Volksschulen Gars am Kamp, aus Steyr und Silberwald im Mon-tafon in die Projektarbeit einge-bunden. Die SchülerInnen analy-sierten – unterstützt durch die Leh-rerInnen und WissenschaftlerIn-nen – Probleme ihrer Region und brach...

The need for estimates of distributed water balance in alpine catchments is addressed. Such estimates are an essential prerequisite for the efficient planning and management of water resource use. Specifically, the maximum appropriate spatial resolution that can be obtained in water balance estimates is assessed, given limited information of physio...

Forest ecosystems are particularly affected by the impact of stress factors. Apart from natural stressors, there are also anthropogenic ones such as air pollutants. Ozone is considered to be the most phytotoxic air pollutant in Austria on a regional scale. In the past decade, concentrations in forested areas have increased significantly by up to 1....

The paper discusses research carried out within the EU funded project GEOLAND. Settlement growth will be modelled for small towns in a polycentric semi-rural region without a defined core city and with competing municipal efforts to attract industries and population on either side of the Rhine - in Austria und Switzerland. The model region is the A...

The 3-year project "Research for Climate Protection: Model Run Evaluation" (reclip:more) is a cooperation of five academic institutions in Austria The major aim of the project is to evaluate the capability of dynamical and statistical downscaling methods in the Alpine region to create climate scenarios at mesoscale and microscale resolutions. Two r...

The relationship between land-use induced changes in production ecology and species diversity was analyzed based on a transect of 38 squares (600 m × 600 m) in landscapes of eastern Austria. "Human appropriation of net primary production" (=HANPP = potential NPP − NPP t), actual NPP (NPP act), harvest (NPP h) and NPP t (=NPP act − harvest) were cal...

Ozone is the most important air pollutant in Europe for forest ecosystems and the increase in the last decades is significant. The ozone impact on forests can be calculated and mapped based on the provisional European Critical Level (AOT40 = accumulated exposure over a threshold of 40 ppb, 10,000 ppb x h for 6 months of one growing season calculate...

Land-use transitions in metropolitan areas have a high impact on environment and appear as pressures on the inhabitants' living conitions. Tools are needed to sup-port planning decisions to overcome or at least mitigate those pressures. Simulation models are such tools, generating land-use change scenarios that help to examine ef-fects of planning...

This chapter describes a system for public dissemination of environmental maps through an interactive Web-based system. This “EnviroMap” system is a platform in which data holders can publish a raster version of their data and data seekers can get access to these data. For data holders, the system provides a tool for data documentation and upload....

Urban sprawl is an essential environmental issue to be monitored and forecasted in order to think about alternatives that could lead to a more sustainable future development. Thus, the objective of the project presented here is to simulate the past and future transformation of suburban land use patterns in the Vienna Region. (The paper describes so...

The paper discusses a model that performs the simulation of polycentric development of suburban systems. It introduces different settlement pattern growth speeds in different suburban regions considering housing area densification and land use change from open space to built up area. Accordingly, the approach concentrates on a Spatial Agent Model (...

This chapter describes the spatial risk assessment for nitrate pollution of groundwater that supplies the Lower Jordan Valley. The assessment is based on the mapping of inputs and leakage of nitrogen compounds. The major risk factors are uncontrolled urban wastewater disposal and agricultural fertilizer use and irrigation. Solid waste dumps and ind...

Human land use influences important properties of terrestrial ecosystems, such as energy flow, standing crop, and biomass turnover. Human interference with ecological energy flows may be studied by calculating the ``human appropriation of NPP'' (HANPP), defined as the difference between the net primary production (NPP) of potential vegetation and t...

This paper describes a method to calculate the spatial variability of the expected annual average ambient air concentration of NOx using standard NOx emission inventories. As the first step, countrywide NOx emission inventories were spatially disaggregated into emission-relevant areas. Pollutant dispersion from emission grids into the neighboring r...

Eine Gruppe von Wissenschaftlern der Austrian Research Centers, Österreichs gröβte auβeruniversitäre Forschungseinrichtungen mit etwa 500 Wissenschaftlern, befaβte sich in den 80er Jahren mit den Auswirkungen der Belastung des bodennahen Ozons auf die Umwelt. In den 90er Jahren wurde zuerst die räumliche Verteilung der Emission von Ozonvorläufersto...