Open data and standards for heatwaves mitigation
At the sixth General Assembly of Smart Cities of Italy held in Padova in October 2025, Ferrara—a municipality in the Emilia-Romagna region—earned the Good Practices prize for its work on open data and citizen science applied to environmental safety and urban planning.
The award recognised an initiative the city has operated since 2019, merging open data with citizen science to monitor heat and air quality in real time. This information then informs urban planning efforts designed to reduce heatwave-related hazards affecting residents.
The Po Valley: Europe's heat island
The Po Valley (Pianura Padana), stretching over 650 km from the Western Alps to the Adriatic Sea, is a vast flat region in northern Italy home to roughly 17 million people—about one-third of Italy's population. It encompasses major urban centres including Milan, Turin and Ferrara. Its geography and position create particular vulnerability to extreme weather, notably intense air pollution and heat accumulation.
According to Alessandro Balboni, Deputy Mayor of Ferrara, "these characteristics make it one of Europe's most exposed areas when it comes to heatwaves and flooding".
In response, Ferrara partnered with Deda Next to adopt an approach treating data as a shared resource. The objective centres on accelerating and improving urban planning to create a city that is more efficient, sustainable and able to withstand climate pressures.
Open standards and open source tools as the backbone of a solution
Two complementary initiatives form the core of this work: the Horizon Europe USAGE Project, which identified heat islands, and the Air Break project, which monitors air pollution. USAGE gathered thermal readings across seasons and drew on satellite imagery spanning 2013 to 2023. Air Break operates through 14 monitoring stations that continuously measure various pollutants.
Data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in both projects flows to a single server managed by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FHG) institute, built around Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. OGC standards are freely available, consensus-based technical specifications that enable geographic and location data to be shared, processed and used across different platforms and software systems. Open source tools handle data processing and generation, while open standards guarantee the data remains interoperable, accessible to the public and not confined to any single platform or vendor. The processed information becomes hourly summaries, made public through the open data portal and displayed as visualisations on the Air Break website.
Balboni emphasises that "this data is fundamental, it allows the Municipality to move from a discretionary approach to urban planning to a scientific one". The city can now identify its most at-risk zones and direct resources accordingly. "Some of our direct actions during the previous mandate included planting 15,000 new trees, freeing dozens of car parking spaces and replacing them with permeable pavement. The data allows us to transform spaces that are hostile and dangerous for vulnerable citizens into places that are livable and appreciated".
For Balboni, the open data portal and OGC standards represent a "game changer", particularly at the human level. He notes that "when a public administration decides to concretely intervene on a city, having all of this ready-made data at hand allows it to make decisions that have a real positive impact".
Federico Modonesi, IT department manager at the Municipality, offers practical guidance to other cities pursuing comparable initiatives: "use open source instruments". He underscores that "open tools allow projects to be carried forward in the long term, as they outlast the public administration that started it, and are adaptable to needs change."
