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Professors JoAnn Cassar and Charles Galdies from the Faculty of the Built Environment and the Institute of Earth Systems respectively will be leading a €150,000 research project funded through the MCST Space Research Fund Programme.

Traditional and heritage buildings in Malta, and many across the Mediterranean, are built in porous materials with mostly a “layered” structure; this applies in particular to walls and roofs. These materials are known to keep the internal environment much cooler in summer than modern buildings, even without air-conditioning.

The new UrbanClimate Project builds on a previous MCST Space Research project funded in 2019, which involved the study of the physical (thermal) properties of traditional and modern roofs using an innovative methodology combining data from orbiting satellites, UAVs (drones) and in situ measurements. Based on the study of traditional layered roofs in Malta, this project has shown that these roof types provide more insulation than modern roofs which are built of concrete and are covered with a water-proofing membrane.

Novel satellite data (such as the ) and China’s recently launched SDGSAT-1 will now be used to thermally map historical urban centres down to building and street level, initially under the current climate, and to link this information with the presence of traditional and modified roofs, identified through the novel methodological findings produced in the previous research.

Working then with climate models which look at climate change scenarios for the near-, mid- and end-century, thermal hot spots in the chosen historical urban centres will be modelled, and then linked back to the presence of the same traditional and modified traditional roofs. The findings will be linked to the effects on the buildings themselves, and indirectly on occupants, through reference to the results of large-scale EU-funded projects like Noah’s Ark project (and the resulting Atlas of Climate Change Impact on European Cultural Heritage) and Climate for Culture, and this to understand further the implications of the findings.

A strong interest in this project is already being shown by a number of collaborating institutions, including Heritage Malta, the Planning Authority, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, the Restoration and Preservation Department, and the Kamra tal-Periti.

The Faculty of the Built Environment and the Institute of Earth Systems express their gratitude to both the MCST and ESA for providing the necessary funding.