A Swedish technology firm is using modelling to help cities find a path to net zero, with Newcastle City Council among their forward-looking customers.
ClimateView has created an innovative platform called ClimateOS, which creates a digital twin city to reflect the complexity of each city’s economy.
Already used in Sweden, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Canada., the platform helps cities manage climate action plans and speed up action to decarbonise their economy.
It works by creating a digital twin city to mirror the complexity of a city’s economy, populated with the best available data. By identifying the best transition path to meet local needs, it models the impact of low-carbon initiatives, so that different ways of meeting carbon targets can be explored.
Enhanced functionality will be rolled out in early 2022 to identify the costs and co-benefits of each initiative, making it easier for cities to make the economic case for their climate plans, minimise financial risk, and win support for investment.
The living climate action plan can then be dynamically updated as new data comes in, allowing cities to monitor the impact of their activities, share progress and refine strategy in a cycle of continuous improvement.
A new round of investment worth €10 million funding will help ClimateView collaborate with a growing number of cities on their net zero commitments. The funding was led by CommerzVentures and NordicNinja.
Cities are central to meeting global climate targets, consuming more than two-thirds of the world’s energy, and responsible for over 70% of global carbon emissions. They are also at high risk from the impacts of climate change, with more frequent and extreme weather events causing devastation worldwide.
More than 700 cities have already committed to reaching net zero by 2050. As
Tim Rippon, senior climate change advisor with Newcastle City Council, said: “The wholesale decarbonisation of a city is something that’s never been done before and the challenge is absolutely enormous.
“ClimateView gives us the platform we need to develop and roll out an ambitious climate action plan. By breaking the net zero challenge down into bite-size chunks you can understand how each will contribute to cutting carbon, start setting year by year transition targets, and then build a robust set of actions on this framework.”
Tomer Shalit, ClimateView’s founder and chief product officer, explained the thinking behind ClimateOS. “The climate challenge is overwhelming but it is also extremely urgent. I could not understand how we had not yet found the right formula to tackle it. There are so many frameworks, methodologies, technologies available so I decided to use what I knew as an agile coach to create a prototype that would break down and organise the transition in a logical and actionable manner, to make it less daunting. Then I gate-crashed a political event and went straight to the Swedish Minister for the Environment and Secretary of State and rolled out the poster, which would later become ClimateOS.
“In reality, it is all and more than I was hoping for. It started quite low-tech, as a 4-metre long poster. Now we have an agent-based model which makes the platform incredibly versatile and capable of tackling complexity like never before, as well as a user interface that gets better and more beautiful by the day.”
Co-founder and chief growth officer Einar Bodström added: ‘Emissions are solidly linked to the way we live, our economic models, to dollars and euros. We will have a chance at solving the climate challenge when we stop looking at GHG emissions in a vacuum. Going forward, our aim will remain to help cities reduce their emissions. But we will help them make the economic case for their transition and empower them to go after the funding they need to make it happen.”
Climate View is part of the Swedish Pavilion at COP26, alongside Volvo and Alfa Laval, and will be hosting a series of events.
More details at climateview.global
