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Hi,

As we leave a particularly hot summer behind us, we open the second issue of the Point of Interest newsletter with a look at the latest evolution of our data products for more livable, sustainable, and climate-resilient cities.

We have released a shade-aware routing system and assessment tools for heat-resilient urban planning. We have also been busy building a new dashboard for customizable disaster risk assessments, launching a new ecosystem for faster OpenStreetMap analysis, and diving into new research projects for open environmental data and humanitarian logistics.

Happy reading!

Climate Action Navigator: What's new and what's next

When we launched the Climate Action Navigator in May 2025, we hoped it would become a tool built through collective action. A year and a half later, it is a joy to see how much has grown from that idea. Practitioners share knowledge and nuance that we would never find in the data alone, and we translate it into analyses that help target climate action where it matters. What began as a few indicators has grown into a collection of assessment tools on active mobility, CO₂ emissions, land consumption and more.

Together with organizations working for walkable and healthy cities, we added new ways to assess shade, comfort, safety, and accessibility along everyday routes. Our shade data now covers cities across Europe, not just Germany, and our analyses have found their way into international reporting on climate and health.

There is more to come. We are preparing city rankings for heating emissions as well as for walkability and bikeability. We are also developing indicators on transitability. They look at how many stops people can reach within different walking or cycling times and how frequent the services are, so you can see not only where public transit is nearby, but also where it is actually useful. And: The Climate Action Navigator is getting a rework, so you will hear about its new features soon.

Because this tool grows with its community, we want to bring our work closer to you. In November we plan to host an online workshop where you can try things out and tell us what you need next. Details will follow shortly.

For COP17 Mongolia (the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), we have mapped the condition of the rangelands around Töv province and Ulaanbaatar, because this area combines very high livestock pressure, rapid urban expansion, and severe climate impact in one region. Combining satellite data, deep learning, and spatial planning, the maps show where restoration should be prioritized. The results also show where responsible solar energy, water harvesting, and roadside blue-green infrastructure can restore land while improving energy, water, and livelihood security.

Getting supplies, staff, and equipment to the right place is a challenging task in a crisis setting, such as after a flood or an earthquake, when roads may become quickly impassable. In the SURE-PATH project (Satellite Unified Routing for Predictive Assessment of Transport Heuristics), HeiGIT has partnered with the German Red Cross and the Logistics Cluster, led by the World Food Programme, to connect Earth observation foundation models with operational crisis logistics.

The system combines satellite imagery with open geodata to assess the passability of transport networks in near real time. Instead of relying on static, binary open-or-closed assumptions, SURE-PATH aims to translate detected damage and environmental uncertainty into travel costs that rise in proportion to how likely a road is to be impassable.

Our latest research publications range from mapping the changing surface of the world's roads with deep learning and satellite imagery to estimating CO₂ emissions from residential heating across Germany at a 100-meter resolution. We have also released a genus-labeled dataset of 16.3 million individual trees growing outside forests in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. For Temuco, Chile, we developed a climate-sensitive indicator framework for urban energy poverty that shows how urban form shapes household exposure to thermal discomfort. In Nature Human Behaviour, we argue that rising health inequities require looking beyond health systems to the combined pressures of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

Thank you for reading.

Do you have feedback, or would you like to see your user story featured in the next issue? Reach out to us at communications@heigit.org.

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