Extreme heat is now the leading weather-related cause of death globally, and the cities most exposed are often the least equipped to act. The Global Heat Resilience Service (GHRS) is GEO's response; a multi-partner initiative to help cities translate climate data into practical decisions on heat risk management, emergency response, and long-term adaptation planning.

This showcase will present the current state of the GHRS partner landscape and the methodological work underway to establish the scientific and operational foundations for a scalable global service. Rather than building from scratch, GHRS is learning from a rich set of live implementations across diverse contexts — and using that evidence to understand what works, where, and why.

The session will highlight three clusters of partnership activity. First, the C40 Cities and IBM Heat Insights Tool, which is deploying city-scale heat risk assessment and green infrastructure prioritisation in São Paulo, Salvador, and Freetown, testing how decision-support tools perform under acute data constraints and variable governance conditions. Second, Alibaba Cloud and the Haina Academy of Engineering's urban heat pilots in Chinese cities, bringing AI-driven modelling approaches into the GHRS evidence base. Third, Europe's emerging climate-health ecosystem, including the Atlantic+ CLIM4Health and DLR CLIMACARE initiatives, ESA-funded projects linking Earth observation data to health outcome modelling in Lisbon, Copenhagen, and Milan.

Underpinning all of this is a systematic methodology assessment being conducted by VITO under the EU Horizon Europe iClimateAction project, which is evaluating these and other approaches against a consistent framework anchored to the ECV data chain and real-world user requirements. The session will share early findings and outline the pathway to an operational GHRS.

This showcase will present how the VALORADA project (Validated Local Risk Actionable Data for Adaptation) translates Earth Observation, climate information and municipal data into decision-ready climate risk insights for local and regional authorities. It will briefly explain the VALORADA approach, implementing co-design with public users, climate impact chains, the selection of locally relevant indicators and demonstrate key project outputs, including the resilience data catalogue and supporting dashboard components. The presentation will focus on evidence of practical use: how the methods and tools have been tested with authorities in VALORADA demonstrators (Gabrovo & Burgas municipalities in Bulgaria, Statutory city of Přerov and Mladá Boleslav in Czechia, Occitania Region in France, Molise Region in Italy and the Region of Central Greece) to support concrete planning needs (e.g. prioritising adaptation measures, defining monitoring priorities and improving justification of decisions under uncertainty). The showcase will conclude with the main lessons for replication and uptake through the GEO community.

High-resolution methane observations from space are now technically mature, but their systematic use in official statistics and regulatory reporting is only beginning. GESat GEN1, a new European mission operated by Absolut Sensing as an emerging Copernicus Contributing Mission, was launched in January 2025 and entered its operational phase in April 2025. Its primary objective – detecting and quantifying methane hotspots at tens-of-metres resolution – has been demonstrated in collaboration with ESA and the Copernicus Rapid Response Desk. This contribution looks ahead: how can such assets evolve into an operational, trusted component of European methane statistics and policy indicators?

We outline an end-to-end integration roadmap, from satellite tasking to ingestion by National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) and regulators.

On the user side, we discuss strategies for making GESat-derived products operationally useful to NSIs and other authorities: stable product definitions; harmonised, machine-readable metadata; explicit uncertainty and quality flags; and service-level commitments on latency, coverage and reprocessing. We conclude with a set of concrete steps and interfaces through which high-resolution methane EO can transition from pilot projects to a permanent, policy-relevant component of Europe’s statistical infrastructure.

The Policy-in-Practice Hub, developed by the Centre for Sustainability and Resilience at the European Space Policy Institute, is an implementation platform designed to translate Earth observation evidence into institutional action. While EO capabilities are technically mature, integration into public decision-making often remains fragmented or pilot-based. The PiP Hub addresses this gap by working directly with public institutions to embed EO into policy cycles, regulatory frameworks, and operational systems.

Initial pilots focus on infrastructure resilience (energy, transportation, water, and food systems) with potential replication across regions. This showcase will present the Policy-in-Practice model, early implementation design, and opportunities to collaborate with GEO partners seeking stronger application-driven impact.