Fostering Climate Neutrality: The Role of the U CAN Project in Sustainable Planning of Ukrainian Territories

The European Union (EU) is one of the leading global actors in addressing climate change through ambitious goals such as the ones in the European Green Deal (EGD) and the Nature Restoration Law (NRL). These initiatives set clear targets for climate resilience and sustainability across member states. Within this context, the fifth work package of the Horizon “Ukraine towards CArbon Neutrality” (U_CAN) project explicitly addresses the Modernisation and standardisation of technologies and practices. This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological contributions provided within the 5.4.4 deliverable, aimed at offering spatially explicit tools and methodologies to support local Ukrainian authorities in developing sustainable and resilient land planning policies, detailing the technical approaches employed. Remote sensing and local data, AI-related methodologies, spatially explicit frameworks and software will be at the core of the activities envisaged in the 5.4 task of the U_CAN project. The main implications of the expected outcomes will be, among all, the contextualization of the environmental and human features both at large and local landscape scales, as well as the support to the definition of planning standards and guidelines.