Climate Action - Megacities need Megadata

After months of intense hard work, I’m pleased to present this report link: “Climate Action in Megacities” authored by my team at Arup.

This report is the first ever comprehensive analysis of actions underway to address climate change in the world’s megacities. The 40 member cities that make up the C40 represent 297m people, 18% of global GDP and 10% of global carbon emissions.

Link: C40 Website

The report was recently presented as a key feature at the 2011 Summit of Mayors in Sao Paolo, Brazil by Chair of the C40 and Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.

“Our strategy for the future begins with gaining a better understanding of where, in fact, we stand today. In Public Health, this is called ‘Baselining’” - Bloomberg

If you know of Bloomberg, you will know that his success in the business world was built around providing reliable access to financial data. It would be fair to say that he has an appreciation of the importance of reliable metrics. In the context of climate change and cities, information forms the key to understanding where we are, and to identifying and unlocking the opportunities that will take us to where we need to be. A means of reliably tracking city and world level climate actions - a dashboard, remains elusive. The good news is, we are at the beginning of such a concept. As a result of this project, we now have some substantial baseline data to work with.

Opportunities

The data shows that there are plenty of opportunities ahead. Imagine your neighbour found a creative way to slash 30% off his electricity bill, wouldn’t you want to know how he did it? The same applies to cities. Plenty of action is taking place in many cities across many different sectors and these should be shared. To illustrate the example, this report asks questions like:

• Does your neighbour own his house or does someone else?
• Does he have to power to make changes to the façade or have to ask permission from someone else?
• What’s the size of it?
• How many people live in it?
• Is he considering installing smart meters?
• If he installed solar panels, was it just a small test project or really transformative?

Most importantly, it asks “How many other people in your neighbourhood can do the same?”

“A sustainable future is good economics” - President Bill Clinton, noting the partnership’s potential to encourage cites who haven’t had access to project financing to do more. (source C40cities.org)

How does this translate into cities?

If San Francisco is implementing transformative action in real time transport displays (informatics), what powers over associated assets (roads, buses etc.) did the mayor have available to make it happen. Then, what other cities that haven’t implemented that action share similar a profile and have the opportunity to do the same? What about GDP or density? Do they matter?

This type of analysis was applied to a of 6000 implemented actions, with key findings highlighted in this report.

The future

The fact that there is a lot more insight to be mined from the dataset gives me the feeling that we are at a really exciting new frontier in helping cities to finally make Rational, Collaborative and Data-driven decisions when it comes to climate change.  I’m keen to explore new visualisations and even see some public interactivity. It would also be great to explore other actions around ICT, focussed less on infrastructure and more on other important and overlooked aspects such as ‘open data’ and ‘Smart’ city strategic frameworks.

I hope you enjoy the report and gain some insight.

All thoughts welcome.

Visualisation for Sustainable Cities PechaKucha Vol.20 

On the 9th of December I presented at PechaKucha Vol.20 on the topic of sustainable cities and how data driven visualisation has an impact on triggering behavioural change for sustainability. On the 10th of December I delivered a similar but more detailed presentation to the International Conference on Smart Meters, Networks and Information Processing.

During this speech I played two videos to illustrate the point. They are below

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Sustainable Cities - The importance of visualisation

The Green Cloud Project, Helsinki

An artist’s projection of the energy consumption data of a local community over the smoke stack of its local power station. This led to an immediate sense of ownership and reductions in consumption. While we cant put a green laser light on every smoke stack, I invite people from all backgrounds to think of how we can borrow this concept in our own cities. How can we bridge the ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ gap?

Nuage Vert à Ivry from HeHe on Vimeo.

Ecological Age - City of Manchester Retrofit, Arup

This video shows the potential vision for the City of Manchester, UK after an extensive retrofitting program. You will notice that the technologies are currently available (although the algae system may be a while off). Notice also how there are no new ‘green buildings’. While improved standards in new build are certainly important, the future of our cities depends on our ability to improve the performance of our existing stock. This video was shown as it highlighted two aspects of visualisation that I think are important:

1. When giving someone a vision of something, make it realistic and achievable.

2. Using positive reinforcement to affect change (in this case inspiration) is potentially more effective than negative reinforcement.

3. Show it and not just say it. The concepts in this video are not new, and are often suggested in studies. 

At ISSNIP I spoke a bit about the Slim City initiative where Arup partnered with the world economic forum to produce a set of research cards. You can find them here:

http://www.driversofchange.com/slimcity/

Enjoy :)

My experience at Design School Americas 2010

In September 2010, I was sent to the USA to represent Australia at the annual Arup design school. This year’s theme was Oceans, and in particular applying design thinking to solve its related Climate Change issues. In a room full of engineers I felt a bit out of place however, I did manage to learn some really valuable lessons. I hope you enjoy it and learn something too!

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Arup design school