These changing environments present a range of new challenges: Developed cities, for instance, must focus on cutting carbon emissions, raising efficiency in infrastructure and buildings, and stimulating a market shift towards cleaner vehicles and more efficient and environmentally friendly public transportation. At the same time, infrastructure quality in many advanced economies is deteriorating. By 2030, some $50 trillion must be invested in infrastructure globally to pace up with economic and population growth.
Cities in emerging markets face issues, such as power shortages and inadequate roads and transport, which hinder growth and development. Infrastructure cannot be built fast enough to keep up with economic and urban development. In times of constrained budgets, city leaders must carefully identify their infrastructure needs, ensuring their investments address the right priorities. The right technologies must be adaptable enough to serve the specific needs of each individual city.
The Siemens City Performance Tool
To tackle these issues, the Siemens City Performance Tool (CyPT) guides cities on achieving environmental targets and provides an indication of how each infrastructure-related decision will affect job creation and infrastructure sector growth.
The City Performance Tool
- is a leading-edge simulation tool that can be used in many different decision-making scenarios.
- evaluates buildings, transport and energy performance through more than 70 technologies deployed at the desired time and implementation level.
- measures the impact of a city’s strategic plans, and compares traditional methods with state-of-the-art technologies.
- determines the implementation rate needed for any city to meet its future environmental targets.
- reports both environmental and economic KPIs across the transport, building and energy sectors.
With a clear and customised strategy, cities benefit from growth without sacrificing quality of life. What technologies are right for your city? Learn more in our CyPT Portal, our self-service tool that provides a simplified demo version of our tool. By offering default data, users can see which solutions / technologies would be most effective in reducing GHG emissions and improving air quality, as well as how many jobs would be created.
The City Performance Tool of Siemens shows a way forward by going beyond a simple carbon footprint. The inclusion of further pollutants (PM10 and NOx) and further sustainability dimensions (cost efficiency and job creation) goes definitely in the right direction.Prof. Dr. Matthias Finkbeiner, Chair of Sustainable Engineering, TU Berlin
City Performance Tool reports
Deerfield Beach - A Sustainable Vision
Deerfield Beach is planning for its sustainable future by leveraging smart tools and technologies. An ongoing partnership between the City and Siemens is showing how this vision could become a reality. Using a proprietary City Performance Tool (CyPT), Siemens is working closely with the City to create a city-wide sustainability plan.
Technology Pathways: Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a leader in clean energy, efficiency and climate resilience. Working with Los Angeles, Siemens published the City Performance Tool Report highlighting technologies that will result in more than 1.8 million jobs being created by 2050. To remain the US leader in clean energy, Los Angeles will need to transition to 100% generation of renewable electricity and 45 % passenger travel by transit and active transport.
Mississauga, Canada’s Climate Future
As Canada's 6th-largest city, Mississauga’s population is projected to pass 900,000 by 2050. The City, one of the biggest economic centers in the Greater Toronto Area, has set an ambitious goal to achieve an 80% reduction in GHG by 2050. Learn how they're using data to build an informed, citizen-centric approach to long-term sustainability.
Portland Takes (Climate) Action
For generations, Portlanders have worked with intention to create a city that is culturally vibrant, intellectually curious, innovative and beautiful. Portland is now committed to achieving an 80% reduction in GHG by 2050 and to doing so in ways that are fundamentally linked to advancing equity.
The Digital District - Washington, DC
The report analyzes technology pathways to achieving the ambitious target found in the District of Columbia’s sustainability plan. It builds on momentum generated by the District’s Sustainable DC vision of becoming the greenest, healthiest, and most livable city in the United States.
Clean air for Madrid
Madrid is prioritizing social development and bringing it on a par with investment to boost the local economy and remaking itself for its citizens. This report continues in this spirit with a focus on Madrid's environmental development, specifically its short term goal to improve air quality and longer term goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Nuremberg - sustainable mobility
Nuremberg is a pilot city for many measures aimed at reducing air pollutants and greenhouse gases. As not all air quality measuring stations in the city comply with the threshold values for air pollutants, the city is working on a set of measures to further improve air quality.
For better air quality in cities
Poor air quality is the number one environmental cause of premature death in the EU, and policymakers have been taking air pollution very seriously. The City Air Management Tool (CyAM) has been designed to help countries to fulfill stricter emission targets for the main pollutants, thereby improving air quality in cities.
Clean air policy
Europe’s Clean Air Policy Package, adopted on December 18, 2013, introduced stricter national emission ceilings for the six main pollutants – particulate matter, photochemical oxidants and ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead.
The policy package is estimated to avoid 58,000 premature deaths, save 123,000 square kilometers of ecosystems from nitrogen pollution (equivalent to almost half the area of the UK), and save 19,000 square kilometers of forest from acidification by 2030 compared to BAU scenarios. However, many countries are struggling to implement it. Siemens CyAM application is a formidable tool to help them do so.
How the tool works
CyAM is an evolution of the City Performance Tool that focuses on indicators for air quality and local concentration of emissions.
After generating an environmental/air-quality baseline, users can calculate the impact of infrastructure technologies on their city. Built upon Siemens’ technology expertise and global database, CyAM calculates the impact of more than 80 technologies from energy, transport and – additionally in China, industry – on environment-related KPIs, including PM2.5, PM10, and NOx. It can also look at other socio-economic KPIs, such as CAPEX and OPEX, in order to design and provide the most effective technology roadmap and policy advice.
This dynamic tool lets city leaders visualise the overall impact of their decisions and identify the right technologies to improve air quality and sustainability without compromising economic growth.
How CyAM Air helps cities make decisions
As a strategic tool targeting to long-term decisions on infrastructure choices, Siemens is now also combining the CyAM capabilities with air pollution forecasting methods based on neural artificial networks, combining weather, traffic and air pollution sensor data, for shorter term decisions.
This helps cities to activate short-term measures such as pollution charging, free public transport, etc., a few days before emissions exceed defined limits. It will also stimulate air quality improvements for the upcoming years, e.g. with the implementation of Low Emission Zones, increased E-Mobility, etc. CyAM has been piloted with the cities of Stuttgart and Nurnberg in Germany and discussions are ongoing with Chinese cities.
For an online demonstration of CyAM and to learn how your city may use tools such as CyAM to fight the day-to-day battle against air pollution contact Siemens.
