CMCC researcher Guglielmo Ricciardi has been awarded the prestigious Premio Emilio D’Alessio 2025 award for his work bridging climate adaptation and mitigation approaches to sustainable urban design using digital tools such as urban digital twins.

As cities continue to play a central role in discussions around climate change adaptation and mitigation, research can help policymakers and stakeholders leverage accelerating technological progress as a source of solutions.

“Cities cover only 3% of the Earth’s surface yet they are home to the majority of the world’s population, have the greatest energy demand and lead to the most emissions. At the same time they are also hotspots for climate change impact manifestations.This duality of emissions and impacts calls for an integrated approach that tackles both adaptation and mitigation at the same time,” says Ricciardi.

The title of Ricciardi’s award winning thesis, The Green and Blue Nexus. Developing an integrated approach for managing climate change and using digital twinning in urban design, refers precisely to this process. “In this case, the ‘green and blue nexus’ refers to the union of the environmental and the digital. I tried to answer two big questions: on the one hand, the impacts of climate change and on the other, the development of digital technologies,” says Ricciardi.

“One of the goals was to understand the level of integration between adaptation and mitigation in urban planning processes and, consequently, in urban regeneration and building-scale projects,” Ricciardi explains.

The research uses innovative approaches and technologies to address what Ricciardi identifies as a critical gap in climate policy and urban design: the historical separation between climate change mitigation (CCM) and climate change adaptation (CCA). “These two approaches are often treated separately, yet attempt to keep adaptation and mitigation together in the the sector of urban sustainability and therefore urban design, building design, infrastructure design, open spaces and so on.”

Ricciardi’s efforts to bring this holistic vision into play have gained recognition not only with the Emilio D’Alessio prize, but also with a special mention for the 25th ECOLOGIA ICU-LAURA CONTI 2024 prize.

A key element of innovation in Ricciardi’s thesis is his use of digital enabling technologies to support integrated climate action in urban contexts. By focusing on Urban Digital Twins and their use in a range of European and American cities, Ricciardi identifies guidelines for creating digital twin modules capable of addressing both aspects of urban policy design.

“The development of a true Urban Digital Twin means developing a system that has bi-directionality: a user should be able to see the city visualised in 3D and receive data, but should also be able to intervene and develop future design scenarios,” explains Ricciardi. “The idea is that the digital twin can allow you to develop complex hypotheses and test future transformation scenarios which allows for a better understanding of the behavior of things like products, processes, and services, and enables the anticipation of failures through real-time simulation and visualization.”

Just as Ricciardi’s thesis looks to answer the question of how we combine adaptation and mitigation techniques to aid the urban design processes and evaluate the future of cities with digital twins, the same question could then be expanded to other areas as a realm for further study. In fact, digital twins can help when analyzing integration in other geographical areas and sectors, such as agriculture – where approaches such as agroecology, agroforestry and nature-based solutions already bring together adaptation and mitigation.

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Several peer-reviewed papers have emerged from this doctoral research:

• “20×20×60: A multilevel climate change analysis framework“ published in the Journal of Environmental Management (2025), presents the comprehensive methodology for assessing climate action integration across policy, urban regeneration, and building scales.
• “Leveraging digital enabling technologies for integrating climate adaptation and mitigation in urban design“ published in Automation in Construction (2025), analyses which digital technologies best support integrated climate action.
• “Digital Twins for Climate-Neutral and Resilient Cities: State of the Art and Future Development as Tools to Support Urban Decision-Making“ (2023), examines European urban digital twin implementations and their consideration of climate issues.

Ricciardi’s current research activities at CMCC also focus on climate risk assessment and resilience of the built environment, including work with the Italian Railway Network (RFI) on infrastructure vulnerability, with the Italian State Property Agency (Agenzia del Demanio) on public real estate risk assessment, as well as participation in the European project MULTICLIMACT, which tests the resilience of people and different built environment assets to climatic and non-climatic risks.

The Emilio D’Alessio Award, named after one of Italy’s pioneers in sustainable urban development, recognises outstanding doctoral theses by emerging researchers that contribute to “an evolution of sustainable development culture in urban settings” and highlight “innovation perspectives and practical applications”.