Green Digital Charter
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This article was originally published on the European Energy Innovation (communication n°2, winter 2017).
ICTFOOTPRINT.eu – The first marketplace to showcase European ICT excellence in energy efficiency
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become part of our daily life, with a massive influence on society, environment and its future.
We are so used to living in our smart-hyper-connected world that we take for granted a number of digital-comforts unimaginable only a few years ago.
The good news is that ICT is one of the most powerful instruments for tackling today’s environmental threats including climate change and exhaustion of resources: ICT-enabled solutions could cut the projected 2020 global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 16.5%.1 The bad news is that ICT is responsible for almost 10% of all energy used and 4% of carbon emissions, comparable to the aviation industry. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution in its infancy, the demands of energy and resources for computing systems, data centres, networks and the supporting e-infrastructures are growing exponentially.
Making ICT greener is no simple matter as it involves different disciplines and requires innovative solutions for improved energy efficiency. Following the AAA (Assess, Analyse, Act) paradigm, before reducing ICT’s environmental impact, it must be measured. Performing an orthodox Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is complex, costly and time consuming. It may require months and hundreds of thousands euros. The big ICT players include environmental friendliness in their core strategy and investment for ethical reasons and public image concerns.
For SMEs it’s a whole different story. Most of them simply lack the basic knowledge or awareness to address the problem; they would not be able to afford an LCA and would have difficulty finding their way in the jungle of calculation methodologies and energy efficient solutions.
With over 10 million ICT intensive SMEs in Europe, this would be a missed opportunity for a healthier environment and for SMEs to improve their competitiveness, increase their energy efficiency & lower their bills. Endless options are available to those who want to join the ICT energy efficiency quest: making them accessible is ICTFOOTPRINT.eu’s mission.
ICTFOOTPRINT.eu is the one-stop-shop for SMEs to improve their ICT energy efficiency, becoming more competitive while reducing their environmental impact and their electricity bills.
Assess the GHG emissions and energy consumption of your products, services and organisation in a quick and simple process, at no cost: Get your personalised report with ICTFOOTPRINT.eu’s Self Assessment Tools SAT-S and SAT-O, ready at the end of 2017, to accompany you through a simplified ICT carbon footprint calculation, following standard methodologies, best-practices and algorithms whose complexity is made transparent for the users.
Analyse the sustainable ICT landscape: join the community and follow the ICTFOOTPRINT.eu webinars to get practical guides & insights from highly qualified experts in the Sustainable ICT sector. Get inspired by the Success Stories of your peers getting ICT energy savings & carbon footprint reduction. Find your way around ICT footprint calculation methodologies with our dynamic Map of ICT methodologies, with 20 downloadable fact-sheets and understandable summaries for non-expert ICT professionals.
Act: drop by the ICTFOOTPRINT.eu marketplace: you will find a wealth of solutions from certified sellers helping you improve your ICT energy efficiency. Think about joining the marketplace as a buyer or seller and give yourself greater visibility with an international market with a community of over 2,500 likeminded players in the field. An influential, international External Advisory Group supports ICTFOOTPRINT.eu that can also provide strategic guidance or outreach support on any products or services you may have.Let us know if you have some interesting stories to showcase and drop us a line at: contact@ictfootprint.eu
ICTFOOTPRINT.eu helps you becoming energy efficient in ICT.
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FR & EUROCITIES, BE.
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© 2017 ICTFOOTPRINT.eu – ICTFOOTPRINT.eu has received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement no 690911. The content of this website does not represent the opinion of the European Commission, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that might be made of such.
This news is an extract from ETSI.org
ETSI is pleased to announce the creation of a new Industry Specification Group “City Digital Profile” (ISG CDP) that will help accelerate the delivery of integrated citizen services and provide a technology road map for city leaders who will benefit from standardized solutions from their suppliers.
The City Digital Profile ISG will enable cities to procure smart solutions with confidence that those solutions will be extendable, configurable and interoperable with similar services from other cities and providers.
City administrators will therefore deliver advanced services to their citizens, whilst respecting essential environmental factors, sustainability objectives and reducing the overall cost of deployment.
Initial cross-domain city applications will include:
- Health and social care (disability entitlement; housing benefit and rent payment; housing condition, assisted living and vulnerability)
- Building management and connected homes
- Urban lighting
- Water and waste management and energy
- Transportation and mobility
- Environmental issues such as pollution and resource optimization
Other key issues such as citizen related data retention and privacy protection will also be considered, in cooperation with such groups as oneM2M, the ETSI founded partnership project and the ETSI Technical Committee Cyber.
Save-the-dates
- 14-16 November : ETSI will organise a dedicated session to present the ISF CDP concept alongside the Smart City Expo
- 20-21 November : Kick-off meeting of the ISG at ETSI headquarters where the group will elect its chair and vice chair and decide on the future work and priorities.
Contact:
Claire Boyer
Tel: +33 (0)4 92 94 43 35
Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org
Iordana Eleftheriadou, Policy coordinator for Digital Transformation, alongside the First VP of the Committee of the Regions, Markku Markkula, at the launch of the Digital Cities Challenge
Launched at the European Week of Regions and Cities, the Commission Digital Cities Challenge is throwing down the gauntlet to city leaders and key stakeholders to make their cities more productive, more innovative, better places to live. They can do so by putting advanced technologies at the service of the citizens.
The challenge aims to select 15 cities with the will to change and unlock unreleased potential, to receive free-of-charge high quality policy advice, coaching and facilitation, from high-level experts with local and international experience. This tailored support will help them to develop and implement strategic plans addressing economic growth and social welfare, all in their local language.
Participating cities will also have access to intuitive assessment tools for digitalisation, innovative training, and a vast networking pool, including fellow cities, strategic stakeholders and Commission networks and platforms. This will help cities stimulate investments through joint cross-regional actions for digital transformation.
In addition to the selected 15 cities, the challenge will support a broader community of cities who wish to participate using their own resources and benefit from the knowledge and networking opportunities provided.
The result will be to give cities a well-developed strategy and action plan to move towards digital transformation and put them on the map as a beacon for future economic growth and improved quality of life.
The call is now open for applications.
To find out more about the Digital Cities Challenge and the call visit www.digitallytransformyourregion.eu
The Digital Cities Challenge is funded by COSME programme of the European Union. COSME is the EU programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)
Visit: www.citykeys-project.eu
ETSI – the European Telecommunications Standards Institute [1] – announced the publication of TS 103 463 that defines indicators for smart cities in Europe.
The Technical Specification, under the title “Key Performance Indicators for Sustainable Digital Multiservice Cities”, uses indicators to express smart development at city level in terms of People, Planet, Prosperity, Governance and Propagation.
The set of indicators is based on the work delivered by the EU-funded project CITYkeys in the last two and a half years and especially the sets of KPIs that the project developed.
Benefits for multiple stakeholders are expected from the new Technical Specification:
- Cities will support their strategic planning and allow measuring their progress towards smart city goals. In addition, benefits are created from the enhanced collaboration within and between cities, providing the possibility to compare solutions and to find best practices;
- Policy makers will benefit from the indicators that help to set policy targets and monitor their achievement. ICT users KPI framework’s sub-themes are formulated as policy goals and therefore the indicators are especially useful to follow progress towards policy goals;
- Solution providers will benefit from better insight into business opportunities for their products and services, and into the possibilities for replication in a different city or context;
- Industrial stakeholders will benefit from the recommendations for new business, e.g. based on open data;
- Citizens will benefit from the indicators as they may help to get a better understanding of complex projects and their impacts.
The first version of TS 103 463 is publicly available and be downloaded from the ETSI online database [4].
www.urbact.eu
URBACT showcases 97 Good Practices for sustainable urban development, all accessible on a searching database providing city practitioners with a snapshot of the practice, why it works and who to contact for more details.
Among them, three GDC signatory cities stand out for investing in digital to impulse participatory change in their more disadvantaged neighbourhoods. For these local authorities, ICT are key enablers to inclusive urban regeneration and social innovation. For this reason, they deserve some attention.
The Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensing presents itself as a new of co-creating smarter cities, designed to tackle social exclusion, poverty and environmental problems by empowering disadvantaged communities with opportunities to develop new knowledge, digital skills and open source tools.
- In Bari, a former disused school has been transformed into a Creative Hub (Spazio 13) where digital communication and technologies play they part in regenerating the city’s suburb.
- In Murcia, granting free Internet to citizens (in classrooms, information-points and through municipal Wi-Fi) is a major measure. Technological innovation is also a pillar of the participative urban regeneration process of the district ‘el Barrio del Espiriti Santo’.
PRESS RELEASE – Brussels, 27 June 2017
Guimarães became the 53rd European city, and the second in Portugal after Lisbon, to join the community of Green Digital Charter cities.
Nathalie Guri, EUROCITIES’ project and knowledge-sharing director with Amadeu Portilha, deputy-mayor of Guimaraes
On the side of the 2020 European Green Capital Applicant (ECGA) workshop organised in Brussels on 27 June, the city of Guimarães demonstrated its commitment to using digital solutions with a view to creating a sustainable future for its citizens.
Amadeu Portilha, vice-mayor of Guimarães, signed the Green Digital Charter (GDC), a EUROCITIES-led initiative promoting the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to reduce carbon emissions.
The revised Charter provides new commitments, such as citizen engagement and greening ICT equipments initiatives, from local authorities eager to collaborate towards an urban future which is smart, green and inclusive.
During the signing event, Amadeu Portilha said that “this commitment follows the path that Guimarães is making to combat the climate changes, decreasing carbon emissions through mitigation measures. The implementation of digital solutions in our territories and improvement of energy efficiency became one of the main focus in our governance. Cities can lead Europe for sustainability and should be inspired by the Digital Charter and other partnerships to a low carbon society.”
deputy mayor Amadeu Portilha signing the Charter
Visit Guimaraes website at www.guimaraesdigital.com
Follow us on twitter @GDCharter
5 days @CeBIT
Dr. Lutz Heuser, from the Urban Software Institute [ui!] presenting the Cockpit pilot
This year, the CeBIT show lasted between 20 and 24 March, and was entirely dedicated to the digitalisation of the world economy. From cloud technology and cybersecurity to robotics, drones and the Internet of Things (IoT), this gigantic fair showcased the latest and best products and services in the digital market.
The Smart City Forum’s stand was located in one corner of the Public Sector Parc. Coordinated by the Urban Software Institute [ui!], the whole area was dedicated to smart city projects being developed in collaboration with German cities, universities, and/or companies.
Also represented were private partners from Cologne and Munich involved in the Smarter Together and GrowSmarter ‘lighthouse’ projects, and in the Hamburg-centred Horizon 2020 funded MySmartLife and reTHINK projects.
EIP-SCC point of demonstration (Halle 7 – A14)
Under the ‘EUROPA’ banner, another stand was allocated to the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC), where three Horizon 2020-funded projects introduced themselves:
- the Green Digital Charter (GDC/GuiDanCe) initiative
- the CITYkeys performance measurement framework
- the ESPRESSO project (the acronym stands for systEmic StandardisationapPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities)
Over five days, visitors (mostly from industry) could obtain information on the EIP-SCC market place in general and the urban platforms in particular. Urban platforms are technological infrastructures by which cities manage data flows across their systems (sensors, cloud services, mobile devices, analytics, social media and many more). These networks help European cities manage the vast amount of data collected by public service operations and sensors (Internet of Things)[1].
Scores of flyers were handed out at that stand to explain the Green Digital Charter/GuiDance, CITYkeys, and ICTFOOTPRINT.EU projects. The 2016 collection of GDC case studies and our two handbooks on the CITYkeys framework were also available to inform visitors.
We need common and open standards
On 19 March, the opening ceremony was attended by Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, partner country of CeBIT 2017, and Angela Merkel, chancellor of host country Germany. In his keynote address, Abe emphasised the importance of education and of common technology standards. “Together, let us develop common curricula and common standards”, he said.
Japan was the partner country of this 2017 edition
Common standards are key to the interoperability of different systems, and they make all smart city solutions scalable, replicable, and efficient. The CITYkeys project offers a measurement framework based on open standards and formats, which is an invaluable tool for cities aiming to improve their local decision making processes and to cooperate at European level. The key performance indicators (KPIs) developed by the CITYkeys partners have been endorsed by the ESPRESSO project, which develops a standardised integrated framework for smart cities.
Smart Cities Focus
CHORA project “Conscious City” (TU Berlin)
Just around the corner, where a humble lamp post offered visitors free wifi access, students from the Technische Universität of Berlin presented a simulation table designed to visualise patterns for collaborative urban planning. Through its ‘Conscious City’ project, the university’s architectural design and urban planning group CHORA intends to demonstrate how games and other platforms can help us co-create our urban environment.
Visitors could attend a number of conferences and sessions on ‘smart urbanism’, where the speakers elaborated on the concepts and technologies behind the drive to develop safe, clean, and efficient cities. Most of these, however, targeted German speakers only.Those curious to know what ‘smart city’ means outside the EU’s borders could attend a lecture delivered by Andrey Belozerov, deputy CIO of the city of Moscow. The recording of his thought-provoking address, entitled ‘Cities – new key drivers of digitalisation’, is available at http://www.cebit.de/event/cities-new-key-drivers-of-digitalization/KEY/74913.
Digital technologies provide great opportunities for cities to improve their local urban planning practices, and help them go a long way toward becoming sustainable, green, and inclusive. What this year’s CeBIT has confirmed again is that much depends on how we use these fast-evolving and omnipresent technologies, tools, gadgets and gizmos.. The event also left visitors wonder if the ‘rest of the world’ is ready to catch up with Europe just yet.
[1] For a more detailed explanation of urban platforms, click here to download a presentation on Vivienne Avery (Greater London Authority) or at http://bit.ly/2obDYyw.
OpenYourCity.com
This article has been originally published on OpenYourCity.com under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
“If I were to decipher the message that 2017 is bringing, I would say that data sharing and co-creation will certainly boost urban innovation in the forthcoming years. And that, in Zaragoza, we have some interesting tools to make it happen:
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our smart Citizen Card, our “de facto” digital platform upon which we can build all sorts of services, from gamification to citizen participation
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our Open Urban Lab, the co-creation lab of the city, located at the very core of Zaragoza’s flagship innovation hub “Etopia Center for Arts and Technology”
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a thriving civic and innovation ecosystem and a program “100 Ideas ZGZ” conceived to set bottom-up ideas in motion, using the city as an innovation platform
The good news started in Luxembourg. After pitching the Citizen Card in late January on the Big Data Info Days on Horizon 2020 we are overwhelmed by the number of agents from either industry and research arena that have proposed to partner with us in big data-related H2020 calls. Almost simultaneously, four groups of design students from the University of Zaragoza presented four innovative ideas for new services on the Citizen Card. They had been working on them for three months both in the classroom and in the Lab.
A week later we took a plane to Brussels: on Jan, 25th Zaragoza’s Citizen Card received the Green Digital Charter (GDC) 2016 Award on ‘Citizen participation and impact on society’. During the conference ‘Cities in Transition – the role of digital in shaping our future cities’ held in Brussels we had the opportunity to present our current and future data policy and discuss it with an engaged audience from government and academia. Take two concepts already developed in these blog’s pages: Big (open) Data, and Data Sharing.
From left to right: Daniel Sarasa, Carlos Alocen and Gerardo Lahuerta after receiving the Green Digital Charter (GDC) 2016 Award on ‘Citizen participation & impact on society’, Brussels, 25 January 2017
We need European funding to materialize these and other ideas, so we’ve been working very hard with the team on several European proposals for using data to spark and guide the co-creation of new public services. We have already tested this principle within the project CITYkeys, where data has allowed us to identify gaps and opportunities for new transport services: that’s how the future network of bicycle parking spots started to be designed. A path, that of the co-creation of new public services based on data insights, that we intend to develop further.
On Feb, 6th we enrolled on a learning trip to beautiful Cascais (Portugal) to join the “Smart Life Incubator” think tank. We were ‘locked’ by the outstanding TM Forum staff alongside other city policy makers from Tokyo, Liverpool, Nice, Porto, Saint Quentin, Cascais and Utrecht. It was an intense 3-day working session focused on addressing urban challenges through innovation and cooperation between stakeholders. We dealt with problems such as mobility, talent attraction, unemployment, on-line services,… We shared strategies to bring deprived public space back to life, or to improve city response in case of catastrophe. Surprisingly, data sharing was identified as a common enabling vector for most of the challenges. The bad news is that no one seems to know how to make it happen without compromising, either legitimate organization assets or personal privacy: the relationship between big data and governments is still heavily cluttered.
So while everybody talks about co-creation, there is an astonishingly small number of succes stories out there. Most projects, like the “Co-creating responsive urban spaces” initiative in Amsterdam, are just starting. And data sharing is something we all think should be happening (for the sake of humanity, right?) but that no one has seen yet. In my Master on City Sciences’ thesis I pointed out that there are gigantic organizational and behavioural (psychological) barriers that block the way. As more projects on co-creation start in the following years, and small scale urban data sharing examples are being built, we expect that a whole new body of knowledge about the subject will appear. This knowledge, of course, will blossom on the urban ground, since it is the natural environment where people’s ideas and big (urban) data can turn into solutions.
The story of co-creation and data sharing is just beginning. We’ll be here to write it.”
Daniel Sarasa Funes is urban innovation planner and Smart City Program Manager at Zaragoza City Council. He is co-author of Zaragoza’s digital agenda 2012-2015 “Towards a Smart Citizenship” and co-editor of OpenYourCity.com
Green information and communication technology (ICT) for smart cities was the subject of the 6th Green Digital Charter webinar on 7 November. Three experts presented their work.
Fredrik Eriksson is ICT strategy officer in Linköping. His city has already developed a broad range of environmentally friendly ICT solutions. Linköping wants to become CO2 neutral by 2025, partly by switching to renewable energy sources. Back in 2013, the city adopted a new travel policy for its municipal staff: “Travels shall only take place when necessary; travels shall, as far as possible, be replaced by video, phone, and web conferencing.” The ensuing ‘greener’ meetings and fewer trips have had a positive effect on participants’ availability and efficiency, he said. Eriksson’s presentation is available here.
Jaak Vlasveld, director at green IT Amsterdam, presented a series of case studies and projects that use or develop green IT tools and solutions. According to Vlasveld, power management should be enabled at hardware level (computing resources) whenever possible. The other layers to be considered in green cloud models are software applications, virtualisation platforms, and data centre infrastructure, he said, stressing that beyond performance, the impact of energy efficiency improvements should also be explicitly assessed. Vlasveld’s presentation is available here.
Silvana Muscella, founder and CEO of Trust-IT Services, presented the ICTfootprint.eu project, which aims to become the consolidated effort that, at European level, raises awareness of metrics, methodologies, and best practices in measuring the ICT sector’s energy and environmental efficiency, and that facilitates their broad deployment and uptake. The project has developed a range of tools and services, which you can consult at ICTfootprint.eu. One such tool is the map of ICT standards. Whether you work for a public administration, an ICT-intensive SME, or an ICT supplier, we strongly encourage you to join the ICTfootprint.eu community to benefit from these services. Muscella’s presentation is available here.
Watch the complete recording HERE
