UrbanCLIM was designed as a decision support system for climate change in urban areas, to enable risk assessment and socio-economic analysis of climate change impact, adaptation and mitigation. Its design enables it to easily extend to other major sectors such as climate related hazards, resilience, water, transport, and health as we work to serve the needs of the UrbanCLIM community of practice.
The UrbanCLIM architecture was designed to provide robust support for three classes of users – Developers, Modellers and Analysts/Policy Makers. Developers are able to reach into the deepest software layers to extend existing, or build new, simulation, modelling and interactive capabilities that integrate seamlessly with the UrbanCLIM application. Modellers are able to use blocks and connectors, user interaction and model aggregation capabilities to create robust models, and Analysts and Policy Makers use simple and powerful analytical tools that smoothly integrate models and other decision making tools into a decision support engine for formulating practical approaches to real world challenges. System dynamics simulation core, climate change datasets, models and applications, are integrated in one platform. Therefore, the UrbanCLIM core can act as a generic platform for many other areas other than climate change issues by adding additional components.