Adaptiveness becomes paramount
All over the world, cities are shaped by profound forces: their population, their technologies and their infrastructures. Even today, these forces collide and urbanization and climate change will spur dramatic changes in metropolitan areas. Cities need to pave the way for constant evolution: digital technologies are becoming increasingly important and urban infrastructures and buildings require a more efficient and sustainable setup.These changing environments set free a swarm of urban challenges: Developed cities for instance need to focus on cutting carbon emissions, improving efficiency in infrastructure and buildings, 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. Looking forward to 2030, more than $50 trillion will need to be invested in infrastructure globally to keep up with GDP and population growth.
Cities in emerging markets on the other hand face issues such as power outages and inadequate public transport and roads, which brake on growth and development. Infrastructures cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with economic and urban development. In times of constrained budgets city leaders carefully need to identify their infrastructure investments ensuring that their investments address their environmental and economic priorities. Technologies need to be adapted to serve local needs to ensure that the right technologies are applied in the right environments, tailored to the specific characteristics of the individual city.
The Siemens City Performance Tool
To tackle these questions, Siemens has developed an interactive and comprehensive tool – the City Performance Tool (CyPT). It gives guidance to a city on how to achieve their environmental targets while providing an indication on how each infrastructure-related decision will influence job creation and the 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 technologies in a city through more than 70 technologies deployed at the desired time period and required implementation level
- measures the impacts of a city’s strategic plans, and compare 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 transport, building and energy sectors
With a clear and customized strategy, cities can benefit from urban growth without sacrificing quality of life. Which are the right technologies for your city? Learn more on our CyPT Portal, our self-service tool, where we offer a simplified demo version of our tool. By offering default data, users can identify which solutions/technologies would have a better impact on reducing GHG emissions and/or 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
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.
Mississauga, Canada’s Climate Future
As the 6th largest city in Canada, Mississauga’s population is projected to be over 900,000 by 2050, and the City one of the biggest economic centers in the Greater Toronto Area. The City has set an ambitious goal to achieve 80% reduction in GHG by 2050. Learn how they are using data to build an informed and citizen-centric approach to long term sustainability.
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.
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.
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.
A Technology Road Map for Pittsburgh
Body Copy: Pittsburgh’s OnePGH strategy establishes a bold vision for the City. it’s aggressive, attainable and has the potential to drive innovation and jobs. Download the report and learn how Pittsburgh is using data to build an informed and citizen-centric approach to long term resilience and sustainability.
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 extremely seriously. The City Air Management Tool (CyAM) has been designed to help countries to fulfill the stricter national emission targets for the main pollutants and by this will improve air quality in cities.
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 air quality impact of infrastructure technologies for their city. Built upon Siemens’ technology expertise and global database, CyAM is able to calculate the impact of more than 80 technologies from energy, transport and – additionally in China industry - on environmental related KPIs, such as PM2.5, PM10, NOx etc., regarding to what extend the air quality can be improved. It can also look at other social economic related KPIs, such as CAPEX and OPEX in order to design and provide the most effective technology roadmap and policy making advices.
This dynamic tool can illustrate city decision makers the overall impact of their collective decisions and identify the right technologies to improve air quality and sustainability without compromising economic growth.
How CyAM Air helps cities to make the right 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.
