Tech route to greener cities ‘smart’ if residents follow

High-tech solutions to make cities greener already exist — from local clean power grids to electric transport hubs and intelligent buildings — but deploying them fast enough to curb climate change is a challenge, city and business officials said. Efforts to cut planet-warming emissions by shifting to less polluting energy and transport, and using natural resources more efficiently, will not succeed unless residents participate, they told an international conference on “smart cities” in Barcelona. “I think it’s very important to involve people, and to give them the opportunity, the possibility to really do something,” said Anna Schindler, director of urban development for the Swiss city of Zurich. The banking hub aims to use technology to “solve real problems for real people” in ways that improve their quality of life as well as tackling climate change, she added. For about a decade, Zurich has been working towards a local aim of creating a “2000-Watt Society”, where residents use only as much energy as would be sustainable for each person on the planet to consume. Reaching that in Switzerland requires cutting energy use by two-thirds and meeting at least 75 per cent of energy needs from renewable sources, so that each person emits only one tonne of greenhouse gases per year. Zurich is working to achieve that goal by 2050 through measures such as creating an online platform that shows users how to source local clean energy and at what price, Schindler said. And in a city where many people rent and do not own homes, they can purchase square metres of solar panels to be installed on the roofs of public buildings as a contribution to shifting the urban energy supply towards renewables, she explained. In France’s industrial powerhouse Lyon, authorities want to use open data to help inhabitants make informed green choices, such as showing them if their roofs are suitable for solar panels, said Karine Dognin-Sauze, vice-president of smart city initiatives for the metropolitan area. As the city’s population expands, it also is trying to reduce the half a million cars moving daily in Lyon, and to redesign its industrial zones into smaller units that run on renewable energy, she added. To achieve some of these grand aims, there is “a need to break the concept that we have politicians on one side, business on another and citizens on another”, she said. “There is too much division and debate that avoids real action,” she noted, urging better cooperation to agree on the right solutions together and “get things done”. Megan Rowling — Thomson Reuters Foundation