Key Research Areas
The research areas at The Underground Future Lab address key challenges at the intersection of energy, infrastructure, urban development and climate resilience.
Underground solutions for global challenges
Continued population growth and the accompanying urbanization and densification pose a challenge to sustainable energy supply, an intact biodiverse landscape, functioning transport systems and coexistence. Climate change is accelerating this challenge, as more extreme and highly variable climate exacerbate these phenomena explicitly in urban environments. Therefore, also several of the UN‘s Sustainable Development Goals address urban sustainability in some or all aspects: clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, industry innovation and infrastructure, and, of course, sustainable cities and communities.
Underground space offers much untapped potential to address these development goals in general and to provide innovative, long-term solutions. Examples include underground energy, heat and water storage, agricultural and industrial production, supply logistics, ICT edge computing data storage, but also clean and resilient infrastructure for smaller and larger cities. Research and innovation for exploring further, not yet eminent possibilities of the use of the underground space offers an additional dimension to a regenerative living on earth. Swiss government has thus launched a strategy for the exploration and development of the Swiss underground space.
Current Key Research Areas
Currently The Underground Future Lab is structured into four key research areas but we are open to address any additional key challenge. The infrastructure is open to all academic institutions in Switzerland.
