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Smart Sustainable Cities: a global development priority
Standards key to achieving and quantifying efficiency gains
Geneva, 26 September 2014 – Strategies for the
sustainable development of cities in Asia and the Pacific will be driven to
a large extent by information and communication technologies (ICT), agreed
participants at the
fourth ITU Green Standards Week held in Beijing, 22-26
September.
More than half the world’s megacities – home to more than 10 million
people – are located in Asia and the Pacific. Cities are powerful engines of
economic growth, accounting for 70-80 per cent of Asia-Pacific’s GDP, but
the inability of city infrastructures to develop at a pace matching rates of
urbanization has given rise to a strong correlation between urbanization and
environmental degradation.
The ITU Green Standards Week in Beijing was the first to be held in the
Asia-Pacific region. Participants highlighted the region’s view of ICTs as
crucial to sustainable development, expected to enable efficiency gains in
areas such as energy distribution and consumption, transportation systems,
water management and waste disposal. A connected citizenry is also seen as a
route to better access to education and healthcare as well as to more
collaborative city governance.
Green Standards Week concluded by advocating a prominent catalytic role
for ICTs in international and regional urban development strategies. This
view was supported at the Rio+20 Summit as well as at the recent United
Nations Summit on Climate Change that took place in New York on 23 September
2014.
In a message, ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré said: “ICTs need to
play a strategic role in the development of renewable energy, with
sustainable cities being key to CO2 reduction and energy management.”
“ICTs must themselves become more environmentally efficient, but they
also have a central role to play in decreasing the environmental impact of
other industry sectors,” said Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s
Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. “This is now becoming well
understood, but that took years of advocacy, including ITU’s participation
in the UN climate change conferences, in order to gain this recognition.”
Green Standards Week focused on the development of Smart Sustainable
Cities. A new
Call to Action was issued, charging ITU with the
promotion of ‘Smart Sustainable Cities’ that integrate ‘smart’ technologies
in city infrastructures and operations to increase environmental efficiency
and socio-economic wellbeing.
The Call to Action calls for stronger cooperation between the energy and
ICT sectors and emphasizes the value of international technical standards in
ensuring that smart-city solutions see the benefits of economies of scale
and interoperability. It tasks ITU to provide a platform to discuss the
necessary regulatory environment and gives strong impetus to ITU’s ongoing
development of an internationally standardized methodology to assess the
environmental impact of ICTs in cities. In addition, it calls for the
development of a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for cities to
measure their progress in the integration of ICTs as part of smart
sustainable city strategies in collaboration with the energy industry.
The event was hosted by Huawei and organized by ITU in cooperation with
the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) and with support from
Fiberhome Technologies, Fujitsu and China Telecom.
Key conclusions of the event’s discussions fed into
ITU-T Study Group 5 Regional Group for Asia and the Pacific,
which met at the same venue on 26 September. The Regional Group captures the
standardization priorities of Asia and the Pacific to ensure that the
region’s needs are taken into account by the work of
ITU-T Study Group 5 on Environment and Climate Change.
For more information, please see
www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/climatechange/Pages/default.aspx
or contact:
Sanjay Acharya
Chief, Media Relations and Public Information, ITU
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