Smart City describes the goal of a new integrated urban development that combines current technical and social innovations. A Smart City is built on connecting people and things (data sharing for accelerating innovation). Smart Cities support monitoring emission reductions in mobility, providing smart energy grids, improving energy efficiency in buildings, monitoring air pollution, water, and waste management, leading to increased awareness on climate change. Cities of the future will integrate solutions for environmental protection and climate change, integrating social inclusiveness, diversity, and the participation of all stakeholders to communities’ lives. From a business perspective, in parallel to these societal phenomena, local economies need to adapt and validate innovative technologies and methods to make processes, such as the production or logistics of goods, as climate neutral as possible. The private as well as the public sector must deal with these and other challenges to create attractive places to live. Digitalisation can help to address many of these challenges.
In Romania, at the level of 2020, GHG emissions from domestic transport, commercial and residential sectors are higher than emissions from industry or energy supply sectors. The Paris Agreement (PA), through the nationally determined contribution (NDC), requires Romania to make significant commitments to address climate change. Under PA, Romania must determine, plan, and regularly report on its contributions to the GHG emissions reductions. For cities, several GHG emissions monitoring, reporting and verification methodologies were proposed at international level (i.e., SECAP, GHG Protocol for Smart Cities) developed. Those methods focus on GHG emissions from the main issues in the cities: energy supply and use, transport, waste, industry. The optimal system, according to recent studies, need to combine satellite measurements with aerial surveys, ground-based sensors and surveys, and continuous monitoring devices. Beyond measuring, robust monitoring, reporting and verification procedures and systems are also essential.
The Competence Centre is centred on research and innovation, by helping cities to make the best use of existing EU programmes and to address their funding and financing gaps. The CC is designed as a Hub for innovation, setting an RDI excellence flag and acting as support for cities into successfully reaching the EU Climate Mission milestones, funding opportunities and Key Performance Indicators.
Our Competence Centre promotes system innovation across the value chain of city investment, targeting multiple sectors such as governance, transport, energy, construction, and recycling, with support from powerful digital technologies. Cities requires a shift in regulations, approaches and instruments combined with the willingness to go beyond existing schemes and habits. It requires an attitude change towards practical implementation that includes concerns of people and stakeholders working together: citizens, local governments, central and regional governments, and European institutions. Following the vision of creating a safe, liveable, and lovable living space, urban neighbourhoods offer a good opportunity to implement and validate new ideas and innovative concepts. This is why our CC focuses on both static (i.e., city infrastructure) and dynamic (i.e. people, businesses) components of the city.
The strategic Agenda aims to:
Advice: (1) Establish a regularly updated map of research and cutting-edge technologies related to the transition to Climate Neutral and Smart Cities. (2) Provide the Competences and the Excellence in advising cities how to adapt results that work in other places to the demands of locale specifics (i.e. culture). (3) Maintain a comprehensive feasibility study on the status of the implementation of the objectives of the EU Climate Mission in Romania. (4) Map the research, development, and innovation resources, including equipment and infrastructures related to EU Climate Mission, to be upgraded and shared with key stakeholders.
Support: (1) Promote a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to the Net Zero transition of the Romanian cities. (2) Facilitate coordination between Municipalities, NGOs, Environmental Agencies and Public Institutions across Romania and ongoing European initiatives, with a particular focus on the EU Climate Mission. (3) Build an effective partnership to promote the transition of cities to Net Zero and help them achieve the 2030 / 2050 target. (4) Enable the take up and transfer of research project results by Romanian cities. For this, we will provide a Digital Twin based on platform tools, with concrete Smart City Services to be validated in a Smart Campus (demonstrator and showcase where governing, economic and social factors met), and further deployed in City Pilot cases (demand-driven testbed pilots). Everything is managed for data re-use and exploitation, thus further leading the excellence to a next EU level.
Service: (1) Define training and upskilling programmes for the transition to a Climate Neutral city for institutions, inhabitants, operators, and professionals. (2) Develop consultancy, guidelines and protocols concerning the integration and use of ICT with a special attention to Climate Neutrality. (3) Develop the PoC Smart Campus and pilot on the three cities selected by EU 100 Mission. The IoT and platform as sensing and actuating infrastructure was introduced in Alba-Iulia by Orange Romania, partner in the CC. (4) Develop Big Data services to model the policy outcomes, for accessing NetZero-related hazards, for city data analysis and processing for decision making and managing based on AI/ML techniques (5) Construct the HPC infrastructure for Big Data managing. This will later be scaled to large Romanian cities level. (6) Develop the Romanian platform to help cities smoothly make the Net Zero transition. This will be provided and adapted to all cities, including at the core the network of sensors for monitoring data on GHG/pollution-related emissions (data-space), with a Smart Knowledge Base (KB) repository for data, and a city dashboard, with reports on progress on metrics (ex. annual achievement barometer). All follows two principles: data-sharing at large, with security and privacy-by-design considerations. (7) Provide counselling and orienting the Net Zero digital transition by helping and advocating on standards and guidelines. (8) Provide training on technologies, capacity building and up-skilling (citizen engagement).
The CC builds a community around, that will help to assess and map what citizens (and society in general) may need in the future and identify new methods, technologies and digital business models aligned with the Net Zero transition. Together with our experts we focus on enhancing the benefits of future digital services for our city communities. From a technological perspective, our innovating Smart Campus is a Living Lab, spreading virtually along all members. The construct will offer the playground for sustainable innovation management and advise cities on the possibilities of digitalisation. By leveraging on the open participation of our members, the Competence Centre will offer access to the developed platform based on established open-source software solutions, making it possible to develop new digital services across all fields of activity and to jointly prototype and validate initial ideas and test existing Climate Neutral Smart City concepts.