Solving Air Quality issues by measuring and monetizing their CO2 emissions.
Smart Cities | Solution
THE CHALLENGE
70% of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. Solving this pain point is key to address climate change, a major threat causing devastating effects to the environment, our health and economies. This is a really serious challenge that gathered over 195 countries in Paris to sign on an historical legally binding agreement, the COP 21.
The first step for cities to realize their potential is therefore to identify and measure where their emissions come from. Simply because you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
The second step is to mobilize the necessary funding to spur climate actions in cities. The shift to a more sustainable and Smart City is a costly one. In most cases, Cities face a big gap in funding. In other words, City Officials need more financial and technological resources to preserve the environment on their territory, and preserve our planet in general.
That is where we think we have a unique response to enable the fight against Climate Change and enable the uptake of Smart Cities: measuring emissions and bringing revenues to Cities at the same time. It is a virtuous circle, where everybody wins: better quality of life for citizens, better information and more resources for the local government, and fuel for growth for the companies that bring innovative solutions and Smart City concepts.
THE SOLUTION
Everimpact measures and monetizes Cities’ CO2 emission by combining Satellites and Ground Sensors’ data. Cities get a real-time map of their emissions at street and building level, at a precision never reached before. This is helpful for Cities to see whether their climate actions are working, and help them target key areas of interventions.
Monitoring, reporting and verifying emissions as part of their climate plan, means that Cities can now monetize their CO2 reductions with various carbon pricing instruments (Offsetting schemes and Taxes). Carbon Taxes is a carbon pricing instrument that is really gaining momentum to bring revenues to cities. This is a very efficient way to finance their infrastructure investments, and move from a polluted city to a sustainable and Smart City.
In a nutshell, Everimpact is an innovative concept because it helps Cities draw important revenues from monitoring their CO2 emissions.
WHY FIWARE
Where FIWARE is making a difference compared to other accelerators is in the support. Instead of starting to develop our application from the ground up, we could rapidly use the FIWARE enablers.
The technical experts and support we received saved us months of development. It is difficult to compete with such a value proposition in my opinion. And it is reassuring for investors to see that your company has a solid platform to lean on.
The use of FIWARE technology has saved us months in the development of our software. In a few weeks we already had many modules ready to be used. Think of a multitude of apps ready-to-be-downloaded in the Apple app store.
We used the following enablers:
- Cosmos GE for Big Data Analysis to gain advantage of the distributed, parallel “divide/conquer” model MapReduce, the fairly convenient deployment, and computing instance instantiation/teardown.
- Geoserver/3D as GIS Data Provider to structure our data as GIS layers, view our data about sources of emissions, time of day, ect.
- 2D-UI GE library to build application-like interface without breaking many established standards for web programming, and present end users with a rich and powerful UI.