This blog was written by Research Associate Diego Manya, who attended ICLEI World Congress 2024 and will attend the Innovate4Cities event in September.
As a data scientist working at the intersection of data science, climate, and policy, I had the opportunity to present the Data-Driven EnviroLab’s Urban Environment and Social Inclusion Index (UESI) at the Global Research & Innovation Symposium in Sao Paulo in June, which was a part of the ICLEI World Congress 2024. This four-day event focused on sustainable urban development that brought together over 1,000 urban leaders, practitioners, policymakers, and innovators to discuss local climate action, regional governance, and equitable adaptation to local and regional challenges.
Through these gatherings with some of the world’s foremost climate innovators, city leaders, and policymakers, I recognized three key trends for creating sustainable and equitable cities.
Urban policymakers need granular, neighborhood-level data:
The consensus I gathered from events and conversations with city leaders, practitioners, and policymakers is that environmental performance data on a city-wide scale is not enough to make properly informed decisions on climate action and adaptation. Cities across the globe need smaller-scale climate data to understand their environmental performance and to propose meaningful policy changes, particularly regarding equity concerns. For example, higher resolution data is necessary to see the disproportionate exposure of more vulnerable groups to negative environmental outcomes within a city, such as air pollution or urban heat. More granular datasets, like neighborhood-level datasets, can help cities better understand where and how negative environmental impacts are disproportionately allocated. In response to this need, cities are moving away from traditional, city-wide dashboards toward spatially disaggregated data that can describe the distribution of sustainability metrics across neighborhoods for decision-making.
Some cities, like Barcelona and Sao Paulo, are already leveraging the recent explosion of remote sensing platforms, products, and services to produce higher-resolution datasets and indicators. These tools can help them establish baselines, prioritize interventions, and better monitor their environmental performance. However, many cities, especially in the Global South, need more resources to gather and analyze this environmental performance data. Collaboration with research initiatives and universities can help cities unlock the benefits of remote sensing data for urban sustainability, as well as understand the limitations of the data they provide.
AI and emerging technologies pose opportunities for climate action:
In addition to the presence of smart cities and Internet of Things initiatives in the last decade’s urban development discussions, there is now a new player in the field: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Quite a few of the conversations and panels on data for decision-making included some mention of AI applications that claim to help cities’ climate planning. These applications range from climate chatbots to climate action ideation assistants based on Large Language Models (LLMs) among others, creating an interesting landscape of new tools and opportunities to foster climate action.
While LLMs are constantly improving their versatility, quality of responses, and interoperability, we should also approach them with caution and understand the limitations of such tools as we define their proper role in urban sustainability. For example, in addition to the already documented phenomenon of ‘hallucinations,’ climate-specific chatbots can be prone to replicate greenwashing statements if the data sources used for their training also include these types of misleading statements. Thus, integrity and transparency in the training and fine-tuning of climate-specific LLMs are of particular importance in developing these tools. This is especially important for cities and policymakers, who may not have the time to engage in the nuances of these topics.
Data integration can foster multi-level governance for climate action
Cities are widely recognized to be at the forefront of climate action, in addition to being uniquely vulnerable to climate change. Many initiatives, such as GCoM, ICLEI, CDP, and others, focus on providing support, capacity-building, and technical frameworks to improve city-level climate planning and action. While the conference highlighted excellent cases of advances made by cities, discussions consistently noted the ever-increasing need for better coordination between national governments, regions, and cities to unlock capacity, resources, as well as the mechanisms that can help ease this coordination.
Understanding how different levels of government and non-governmental actors approach climate action, through analysis of both structured and unstructured data, is becoming increasingly important. In the lead-up to the 29th annual UN Climate Change Conference (COP29), we will likely see a greater development in this trend, particularly in the context of initiatives such as the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP). Both specialized and generalized LLMs will likely play a significant role in promoting data integration and developing methodological frameworks to provide structure to various disparate sources of information on city-level climate action.
The ICLEI World Congress 2024 was an exciting space for fruitful discussion and potential collaborations to address climate change, showcasing both the efforts made towards urban sustainability and the opportunities to collaborate and develop solutions to help us toward that objective. In this sense, I’m thrilled that we will have the opportunity to contribute further to this conversation by launching our 2024 UESI at the Innovate4Cities Conference this September. Furthermore, we will continue our conversations about AI, data integration and remote sensing. Working alongside colleagues from around the globe, we aim to leverage the capacity of new technologies to address the challenges in sustainable urban planning, climate action and environmental performance.
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