Combating Climate Change through Smart Innovations - Examination of smart city concept in light of sustainability

Abstract

While the Earth’s resources and capability are at its limits, while large part of the society is suffering from hardship, the other part is responsible for overconsumption, enormous waste generation. Pollution combined with self-centred human attitude led to the most crucial situation in our century of crises, Climate Change. It is currently one of the most urgent global problems, which are interconnected, complex and it has environmental, economic, social, and technological perspectives. While cities represent most of the population, the biggest greenhouse gas (GHGs) emitter, they use arable land for urban purposes, and they are the centre of services and production. Accordingly, cities were seen as excellent testing-grounds to put smart solutions in a new prospective and examine whether they could be or has been adapted into sustainable climate change combat by increasing the efficiency of mitigation and adaptation processes. For that reason, it will be investigated whether the focus of smart (city) solutions is either primarily environmental (smart-sustainable), or the focus is economic efficiency, but its use is more complex, which enhance sustainability. Based on this aim, the dissertation uses inductive approach, which is applied by using qualitative, explorative methodology such as semi-structured interviews (N=17) with content analysis to define the city level efficiency of the solutions, the driven factors within the decisions, and non-probability sampling methods during the questionary (N=550) to specify smart ability to increase climate awareness at the level of individuals. The research findings confirmed that, however the economic efficiency still dominate the development decisions, the environmental aspect is increasingly important mostly in the fields of mobility, energy usage and heating through the more complex, sustainable, resilient applied approaches in the implementation processes. In addition, there is a shrinking knowledge gap between the ‘investors’ (final users) and the providers of smart solutions, and the relevance of the sensitization and education of the population has become more important. Finally, through the survey, interviews and research, existing smart solutions have been collected within the six sectors of smart city to contribute to the educational purposes.