Urban Intelligence for Carbon Neutral Cities: Creating Synergy among Data, Analytics, and Climate Actions

Abstract

Cities are critical research subjects in carbon neutrality, considering they produce more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and their crucial role in taking climate actions. The pathway towards a greener society requires consensus, intelligence, and actions among global cities as a network of carbon neutral cities (CNC). Considering cities as complex system-of-systems, synergy among various sub-systems can create co-benefits through the progress towards carbon neutrality. Large volume, velocity, and variety of urban data provide new opportunities for quantifying, analyzing, and visualizing environmental–social–technical dynamics in urban systems. Rich data resources, advanced analytics, and climate actions collectively enable urban intelligence by leveraging data from heterogeneous sources with different spatial granularity and temporal frequency. Such intelligence can promote synergy across sub-systems and domains to support more responsive, precise, proactive planning, policy, and managerial actions. With a discussion on future innovation in urban intelligence for CNC, this paper presents conclusions on how urban intelligence can promote a smarter and greener society.

Exploring the Link between Street Layout Centrality and Walkability for Sustainable Tourism in Historical Urban Areas

“…Accordingly, it is a complex, multidimensional concept that needs a set of sustainability indicators rather than a single hand to measure it [10]. As a sequence, the primary concerns of the idea of sustainability are the preservation of the natural environment [11,12], the thermal effect of ecological network factors [13], tourism flow [14], accessibility and economic linkage [15][16][17], hotspots during the COVID-19 pandemic [18], Urban Intelligence for Carbon Neutral Cities [19], the complex structural to deal with the disturbance of emergencies [20], and the walkability [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. And to create vibrant and livable cities that support walkability and sustainability, an effort to promote active street network connections must be made with shorter block lengths and many intersections to facilitate more direct travel between locations [30,31].…”

Advanced sustainable design and experimental assessment to address climate neutrality in Mediterranean areas

“…In other words, it is a matter of accelerating the transition from an 'energyintensive' model to a 'climate-neutral' one, in which the transformation of the user from mere 'consumer' to 'consumer-producer' (prosumer) takes place. The concept of 'climate neutrality' goes beyond that of 'carbon neutrality' within the paradigm of sustainable development: the last COP26 in Glasgow, in fact, together with what is envisaged by the New Green Deal [3] and by the policies in place at EU level (such as in Italy, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan-NRRP and the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan-NIECP) aim to promote strategies to achieve 'climate neutrality' of cities by 2050, with substantial financial investments cascading to regions and municipalities. Certainly, according to the latest IPCC report [4], carbon peaking and neutralisation by 2030 and 2050 is essential, in order to limit the temperature increase to well below 2 °C and avoid the negative impacts of climate change caused by the sharp increase in carbon dioxide emissions [5].…”