Win the day-to-day battle against air pollution
Learn hew digital technologies contribute to tangible improvements in local air quality by enabling city leaders and citizens to make more informed decisions.
Adaptiveness becomes paramountAll over the world, cities are shaped by profound forces: their population, their technologies and their infrastructures. Even today, these forces collide and urbanization and climate change will spur dramatic changes in metropolitan areas. Cities need to pave the way for constant evolution: digital technologies are becoming increasingly important and urban infrastructures and buildings require a more efficient and sustainable setup.
These changing environments set free a swarm of urban challenges: Developed cities for instance need to focus on cutting carbon emissions, improving efficiency in infrastructure and buildings, stimulating a market shift towards cleaner vehicles and more efficient and environmentally friendly public transportation. At the same time, infrastructure quality in many advanced economies is deteriorating. Looking forward to 2030, more than $50 trillion will need to be invested in infrastructure globally to keep up with GDP and population growth.
Cities in emerging markets on the other hand face issues such as power outages and inadequate public transport and roads, which brake on growth and development. Infrastructures cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with economic and urban development. In times of constrained budgets city leaders carefully need to identify their infrastructure investments ensuring that their investments address their environmental and economic priorities. Technologies need to be adapted to serve local needs to ensure that the right technologies are applied in the right environments, tailored to the specific characteristics of the individual city.
The Siemens City Performance Tool
To tackle these questions, Siemens has developed an interactive and comprehensive tool – the City Performance Tool (CyPT). It gives guidance to a city on how to achieve their environmental targets while providing an indication on how each infrastructure-related decision will influence job creation and the infrastructure sector growth.
The City Performance Tool
- is a leading-edge simulation tool that can be used in many different decision-making scenarios
- evaluates buildings, transport and energy technologies in a city through more than 70 technologies deployed at the desired time period and required implementation level
- measures the impacts of a city’s strategic plans, and compare traditional methods with state-of-the-art technologies
- determines the implementation rate needed for any city to meet its future environmental targets
- reports both environmental and economic KPIs across transport, building and energy sectors
With a clear and customized strategy, cities can benefit from urban growth without sacrificing quality of life. Which are the right technologies for your city? Learn more on our CyPT Portal, our self-service tool, where we offer a simplified demo version of our tool. By offering default data, users can identify which solutions/technologies would have a better impact on reducing GHG emissions and/or improving air quality, as well as how many jobs would be created.
The City Performance Tool of Siemens shows a way forward by going beyond a simple carbon footprint. The inclusion of further pollutants (PM10 and NOx) and further sustainability dimensions (cost efficiency and job creation) goes definitely in the right direction.Prof. Dr. Matthias Finkbeiner, Chair of Sustainable Engineering, TU Berlin
City Performance Tool reports
For better air quality in citiesPoor air quality is the number one environmental cause of premature death in the EU, and policymakers have been taking air pollution extremely seriously. The City Air Management Tool (CyAM) has been designed to help countries to fulfill the stricter national emission targets for the main pollutants and by this will improve air quality in cities.
Clean air policy
Europe’s Clean Air Policy Package, adopted on December 18, 2013, introduced stricter national emission ceilings for the six main pollutants – particulate matter, photochemical oxidants and ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead.
The policy package is estimated to avoid 58,000 premature deaths, save 123,000 square kilometers of ecosystems from nitrogen pollution (equivalent to almost half the area of the UK), and save 19,000 square kilometers of forest from acidification by 2030 compared to BAU scenarios. However, many countries are struggling to implement it. Siemens CyAM application is a formidable tool to help them do so.
How the tool works
CyAM is an evolution of the City Performance Tool that focuses on indicators for air quality and local concentration of emissions.
After generating an environmental/air quality baseline, users can calculate the air quality impact of infrastructure technologies for their city. Built upon Siemens’ technology expertise and global database, CyAM is able to calculate the impact of more than 80 technologies from energy, transport and – additionally in China industry - on environmental related KPIs, such as PM2.5, PM10, NOx etc., regarding to what extend the air quality can be improved. It can also look at other social economic related KPIs, such as CAPEX and OPEX in order to design and provide the most effective technology roadmap and policy making advices.
This dynamic tool can illustrate city decision makers the overall impact of their collective decisions and identify the right technologies to improve air quality and sustainability without compromising economic growth.
How CyAM Air helps cities to make the right decisions
As a strategic tool targeting to long-term decisions on infrastructure choices, Siemens is now also combining the CyAM capabilities with air pollution forecasting methods based on neural artificial networks, combining weather, traffic and air pollution sensor data, for shorter term decisions.
This helps cities to activate short-term measures such as pollution charging, free public transport, etc., a few days before emissions exceed defined limits. It will also stimulate air quality improvements for the upcoming years, e.g. with the implementation of Low Emission Zones, increased E-Mobility, etc.
CyAM has been piloted with the cities of Stuttgart and Nurnberg in Germany and discussions are ongoing with Chinese cities.
For an online demonstration of CyAM and to learn how your city may use tools such as CyAM to fight the day-to-day battle against air pollution contact Siemens.