Opinion

Smart cities need to smarten up

A clean environment is key to the smart city concept but focus on areas like air pollution and waste recycling are still lacking, says Sam Ibbott.

The United Nations estimates that 54 per cent of the world’s population live in urban areas, with this figure expected to grow to 66 per cent by 2050. Within the European Union the figure is already estimated to be at 75 per cent. As cities become dominant in our economies and societies, their environmental challenges come into sharp focus.

"We found that the smart city concept is still relatively new – and the environmental aspect of smart city thinking even more so. Many of the environmentally-focused case studies we found are still in the research and development phase, but there are encouraging signs that they have an important role to play – typically reducing pollution or polluting activity by around 10-20%."

We need to solve the environmental problems of cities if we are to have any hope of tackling our environmental problems as a whole.  At the same time there is great interest in the concept of ‘smart cities’ and the opportunities that exist around solutions that were not available to us in the past.

It struck us, as a trade association representing environmental technology and services companies, that in the visual representations of ‘smart cities’ often found in marketing materials, the environment is unfailingly clean and the sun shines. What was less clear is how we get from where we are to where we want to be, and if the positive environmental outcomes of these future cities will happen by default or whether particular attention is required if they are to be realised.

We wanted to understand whether innovative smart approaches can offer cities new ways to tackle entrenched environmental challenges, and likewise whether a determination to tackle these challenges can stimulate new smart thinking.

‘Smart’ can, and does, have many different definitions. When writing our newly-published – ‘Getting the green light: will smart technology clean up city environments?’ – this lack of clarity was the first problem we faced. For the scope of our research we considered smart initiatives or applications to be those which are based upon using the power of networked devices (both centrally and citizen controlled) and the analysis of ‘big data’ to improve the functioning and capability of cities.

Our analysis shows that whilst the environment of modern cities is vastly better than that of a century ago, in recent years UK cities, despite ongoing efforts, have made limited further progress on the key environmental challenges of air quality, carbon emissions and energy use, recycling rates and water leakage. 

Where ‘smart’ has come into its own is in the collection of more accurate data on these challenges through either remote sensors (which electronically send data back to central databases) or smart meters which record and transmit usage data from utility connections. The resulting ‘big data’ can be analysed to help policy makers better understand problems and devise more targeted and sophisticated methods of dealing with them.

We found that the smart city concept is still relatively new – and the environmental aspect of smart city thinking even more so. Many of the environmentally-focused case studies we found are still in the research and development phase, but there are encouraging signs that they have an important role to play – typically reducing pollution or polluting activity by around 10-20%.

The immaturity of the market for green smart technologies means that hard evidence of real world impacts is unfortunately limited and dissipated. We believe that greater effort is needed to create a central case study depository to enable a better understanding of where knowledge and tested best practice can be deployed elsewhere, and the better dissemination of hard evidence on what works and what doesn’t.

By extension, while the aim is to develop city-wide approaches, this can be technically and commercially challenging in the short term. Often there will be value in piloting smart environmental solutions at sub-city scale where there is a desire to act matched with an appropriate governance or institutional framework. An example might be a university campus, or an area of a city with a small number of major landlords/developers who could be encouraged to sign up to common implementation of a smart initiative.

It is important, however, not to ‘oversell’ the impact of smart solutions – in many cases the most effective approaches will be the blending of smart elements with traditional engineering solutions. Smart technologies are not always so effective at cutting out pollution at source (from vehicle exhausts for example) or when more traditional engineering solutions are required to manage physical flows.  

Our report is by no means the last word on the matter, but we hope it will stimulate discussion on the development of a viable market in smart green solutions. Supporting this market will be a leading work stream for EIC in 2015.

Sam Ibbott is deputy public affairs director at the Environmental Industries Commission (EIC).

EIC is the trade association for the UK’s environmental technologies and services sectorwww.eic-uk.co.uk