Page 73 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

This extreme weather event served as the city’s impetus for building a digital version of itself
in order to better predict and mitigate future associated risks through resilience testing. Risk
management is, in fact, expected to be a major focus of most cities adopting digital twins,
as climate change is creating rapid new challenges and risks globally. Newcastle can now
prepare for future floods by simulating which buildings will be flooded, which infrastructure
will have to be closed, which hospitals may be affected operationally, and so on.

Newcastle’s digital twin project is jointly spearheaded by Newcastle University and the
utility firm Northumbrian Water, with most of the data coming from the university’s Urban
Observatory project. This project has sensors all over the city monitoring pollution, water
quality and biodiversity, among other indicators (as seen in Figure 27) and can use these
data to test hypothetical emergencies to assess how Newcastle may fare in the event of
flooding and extreme weather, as well as to evaluate how the city may cope with issues
such as significant population growth. Simulated changes may be seen immediately, from
visualizing what would happen if the River Tyne rose by a few metres to what the city would
look like if the population aged over a certain period. The twin may also be used to model
human behaviour by, for example, determining the most likely routes people would use in
the event of another extreme flood. The Urban Observatory has already collected over half
a billion data points and this information is now starting to shed light on the way different
systems interact across the city and provide a baseline for Newcastle’s integrated digital
twin data platform.

Figure 27: One of the Urban Observatory's AQMesh sensors being positioned [xxvii]

While this project has made Newcastle a frontrunner in the use of digital twin technology to recreate
the entire city digitally in order to help planners stress-test the city’s infrastructure, commercial off-
the-shelf style software offerings are expected to emerge to lower the costs of this technology. In
order to best leverage this technology to its full potential, cities will still need to define their approach,
establish how the project will be managed end to end, facilitate widespread adoption of the end
results and engage in activities to help combat climate change.

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