A Technology-First Approach to Climate-Smart Cities

According to the United Nations, cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 percent of all carbon dioxide. Today every other person lives in a city, but by 2050 cities will be host to 70 percent of the world’s population, with most of this growth in emerging markets. The development and mass adoption of climate-smart technologies that are affordable and practical to implement will be essential in making our urban environment smarter, more livable and more productive. Cities will need to feed, water, energize, mobilize, digitize and clean up after themselves in increasingly circular metabolisms. It will take the commitment and creativity of the public and private sectors as well as local communities for cities to flourish in independent and sustainable ways.

How do We Define Climate-Smart Technology Disruption in Cities?

Disruptive technologies that dramatically reduce resource consumption and improve air quality will shatter the status quo and lead to rapid societal and economic advances. These new technologies will interconnect people, buildings and the natural environment in surprising ways, making cutting-edge cities more competitive locations to live and work. Tomorrow’s more climate-centric cities will value and incentivize technologies that help them meet science-based targets of lower carbon emissions and achieve their commitments to the Paris Agreement. As cities capture data and become more cognitive, they will report on their achievements with greater precision, producing ever higher standards for what truly constitutes a climate-smart city.

Producing and Storing Energy

Cities of the future will largely power themselves. Distributed renewable generation and electricity power storage will transform the energy landscape, making dependence on the grid redundant. Widely usable, emerging technologies such as see-through solar cells and adaptive solar façades will work particularly well in dense urban settings with limited exposure area. Domestic batteries such as Tesla’s Powerwall will store excess energy so homes rely completely on their own power generation. Block-chain technology will support the development of autonomous microgrids that offer “prosumers” the opportunity to sell their surplus energy through peer-to-peer transactional platforms.

Older cities can be retrofitted with fuel cell-powered co-generation systems that generate electricity and re-purpose waste heat at the district level. By using high-efficiency, triple-effect absorption chillers, waste heat is supplied to buildings for space heating and water heating or to generate chilled water for air conditioning. Buildings that receive their energy supply from district co-generation systems don’t require their own HVAC systems or boilers, resulting in efficiencies of up to 40 percent.

Rooftop, Hydroponic and Vertical Farming

In the United States, food now travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to table. Urban farms in emerging markets can help consumers to reduce their “foodprint” by providing them with the opportunity to purchase food grown within their communities. These farms also cut down on the significant fossil fuel consumption necessary for transport.

Bus Rapid Transport and the Mushrooming of New Mobility Trends 

Highly congested cites in emerging markets have the potential to leapfrog the transit paradigms established in previous centuries by adopting new technologies and business models. Bus rapid transport (BRT), or modern bus systems with dedicated traffic lanes, is a starting point for cities to inexpensively develop a mass transit infrastructure. In Brazil, Curitiba has roughly three and a half times less car travel per person than a car-dependent city such as Brasilia, because of its extensive BRT system. Cheaper batteries will allow electric buses to provide efficient, green and quiet public transportation. And urban planners can reduce parking spaces and other disincentives to driving, enabling bike, scooter and car-sharing programs to sprout, providing a competitive array of accessible options to dart around a city.

In Brazil, Curitiba has roughly three and a half times less car travel per person than a car-dependent city such as Brasilia, because of its extensive BRT system.

Green Urban Communities Connected to Transit

Planning and policy innovation will be critical for green urban communities to take shape and prosper, particularly with regard to the integration of transportation and urban land use planning. In Barcelona, “super blocks” have been designed that combine city spaces into pedestrian-friendly, car-free mini grids. Copenhagen has used a “finger plan” to guide growth along five well-defined, linear corridors separated by “green wedges” with open spaces, water sheds and ecological preserves. Only compact, mixed-use developments (called “transit-oriented developments”) were permitted around train stations to ensure a sustainable urban form.

Attractive, green urban communities located at public transit nodes can be designed anywhere in the world that combine office, residential and retail use. These mixed-use developments match density to transit capacity, rewarding city-dwellers with less expensive and more environmentally-friendly options while improving their quality of life.

Efficiency and the Art of Designing, Constructing and Managing Buildings

High-density urban areas that are built using green methods pollute less and are more energy-efficient. Technology already exists to manage the entire life-cycle of buildings, from design to construction to ongoing management. IFC’s free EDGE software provides building professionals in more than 1,300 cities with an estimate of the extra cost to design a resource-efficient building, showing the payback period through reduced utility bills. Cities can use EDGE to aim for zero net carbon buildings that optimize passive design features for a particular climate. These include natural ventilation, ceiling fans and super-insulated façades with low-energy heating and cooling systems powered by renewables.

Construction software like PlanGrid and Procore enable construction workers to document and assign punch list items to team members through hand-held devices, essentially eliminating paper onsite. Schneider Electric, with its EcoStruxure Building platform, uses sensor-based technologies and the Internet of Things to empower building engineers to connect, automate and manage their energy environments.

The Possibilities of Sensor Networks and 5G Cellular Technology

Urban innovators now have the possibility to embrace sensor technologies for everything from traffic flows to air and water quality detection, to energy management. The price of equipping a city with sensors has fallen from thousands of dollars per sensor a decade ago to as little as one hundred dollars today, making the technology immediately applicable. For example, as cities convert streetlights to LED lighting, they can add sensors to streetlights.

5G cellular networks can help cities benefit more from sensor technologies by opening higher frequencies in the millimeter wave spectrum (24-86GHz) for high speed wireless communications. Compared to the current 4G network, 5G improves performance along all parameters of mobile networks, including coverage, bandwidth, latency and cost. 5G networks will have a reduced footprint compared to traditional cellular base stations, shrinking from a full-size switching cabinet to the size of a pizza box. As cellular operators look for numerous sites to host their small cells, cities can monetize access to preferred locations, such as billboards, streetlights and public WiFi sites.

Data Sharing that Leads to New Urban Insights

The flow of data generated by sensors and other means will revolutionize how policy makers gain insights and make decisions about city services. A vast amount of anonymized data is now available from geo-spatial tools such as Google maps, online ride share programs, and various software applications.

·      Uber is sharing its data through its new digital platform, Movement, which lets cities understand and react to traffic patterns based on raw data from billions of trips.

·      Google’s Sidewalk Labs uses technology to tackle such urban growth issues as efficient transportation and the high cost of living.

·      The World Bank Group’s CURB (Climate Action for Urban Sustainability) is a free, interactive scenario planning tool that helps cities improve air quality and reduce congestion.

·      Ho Chi Minh City is using artificial intelligence to enforce zoning governance through the use of mobile apps with geospatial data.

Sensors, Sorting and Smart Bins to Manage Waste

The smart waste collection market is brimming with new technologies that can prevent landfills from bursting at the seams. Ideally, all waste generated by a city should be contained in its borders with the goal of zero output, and reprocessed rather than buried.

Perhaps the most significant opportunity is in state-of-the-art-based sensor sorting, which moves trash through a machine that sorts out as many as 30 types of waste. Other technologies such as pneumatic tube systems that suck trash through high-tech chutes are still expensive for widespread use in emerging markets. Creating liquid fuel products (such as ethanol and diesel fuel) by converting waste to energy has not yet proven to be profitable. The game changer may be gasification that works at a small scale, reducing transportation costs and generating byproducts that can be used to create a more circular economy.

Capturing, Storing and Treating Water

With water becoming increasingly precious, cities will need to take advantage of every possibility to capture and store it, returning treated greywater to district systems. The wastewater chain can produce energy, heat and resources as raw materials are extracted. New technologies can also minimize losses from stressed city water systems, including through sensors and by leak detection robots. Parks and plazas can double as swales, basins and runoffs for large amounts of water, a practice put in place in Copenhagen. In hotter climates, green areas and water surfaces can cool an urban area by 10 degrees Celsius compared to a concrete counterpart.

Climate-Smart Cities as Living Laboratories

With all of the technologies available in the future, cities will need to experiment, cross-pollinate, and be entrepreneurial in order to become living laboratories of data-driven design. Decision-makers must ascertain which are the best solutions that will stand the test of time, responding with a policy-driven yet entrepreneurial approach that wraps around every major area: energy, water, transit, farming, waste, telecommunications and green buildings.

 As technologies are woven into a single, more densely-knit fabric, climate-smart cities will perpetuate themselves and become the norm. But new technologies by themselves will not be enough. Disruption will be dependent upon the eagerness of urbanites to shed old habits and lean in to the possibilities of a world that is more efficient, clean-tech oriented and viable for all.

"A Technology-First Approach to Climate-Smart Cities," written by Rebecca Menes and Prashant Kapoor, first appeared in IFC's Reinventing Business Through Disruptive Technologies.