ClimateView offers digital twin platform free to cities

Swedish technology company ClimateView announced at the Smart City Expo World Congress event in Barcelona that it is making some functionality within its platform free to cities to help them speed up action to reduce emissions. This follows research which suggested that over half of cities have no climate action plan in place.

Through a partnership, environmental non-profit CDP and Microsoft will promote the ClimateOS platform, which is built on the Microsoft Azure cloud, to their networks.

The ClimateOS Analysis toolkit within ClimateOS creates a digital twin of a city, aiming to reflect the complexity of each city’s economy. It models the impact of dozens of low carbon transitions across a range of sectors, including transport, buildings, industry, energy and waste.

Tomer Shalit, ClimateView Founder and Chief Product Officer, said: “Governments’ climate pledges are not enough to avoid dangerous climate change and cities are stepping up to fill the gap. We want to turbocharge climate action by giving cities free access to a platform where they can plan, simulate and execute coordinated measures to cut carbon emissions across their whole economy.”

The company says that city emissions inventories are often based on extrapolations from national data which can be up to two years old and do not reflect actions the city is taking. A news release said: “The toolkit enables cities to understand the activities that generate their emissions and gather an evidence base that reflects their actual circumstances. This enables cities to understand priorities for action and make concrete plans to reduce emissions from each activity.”

The toolkit breaks down a citywide economy into 80 transition elements, such as how many people need to stop driving petrol cars and instead take public transport, cycle or drive an electric vehicle or how many buildings need to be retrofitted and how much investment is needed. Cities can then plan actions to drive each shift.

“Understanding all of these is so much easier to do with a digital twin,” the company said. “It gives you the data of the carbon-driving activities, captures the complexity of the changes and reveals sufficiently in-depth insights to act.”

Further functionality for collaboration and implementation is available on a paid-for basis.

System-wide approach

CDP has set up a framework for cities worldwide to disclose their environmental impact. In 2020, 812 cities disclosed emissions and 67 percent had citywide inventories of their emissions. But over half (51 percent) had no climate action plan, only 18 percent had set targets aligned with the 1.5°C Paris goal, and just six percent had set interim targets for cutting emissions.

Kyra Appleby, CDP Global Director Cities, States and Regions, said: “Cities are on the front line of climate change. In many countries their climate targets are more ambitious than national commitments but they need support to decarbonise rapidly. We are confident that ClimateView will help global cities reporting to CDP to take a system-wide approach to implementing science-based climate strategies, and we look forward to driving transparency and action together.”

Newcastle, Cincinnati, Mannheim, and Bern are among more than 35 cities and municipalities that are already using the ClimateOS platform in the UK, US, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Canada.

Dominik Stroh, Project Manager for Climate Protection Monitoring in the City of Mannheim, recently told Cities Today that the city will use ClimateOS to track its forthcoming climate strategy in close to real-time.

Last year, another digital twin provider, Cityzenith, also announced it was making its platform available free to cities. It has since been adopted for projects in cities including New York, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Image: Iakov Kalinin | Dreamstime.com