The City of Ålesund recognizes that climate change is a global challenge that requires the city to work with local entities, regional actors, and the international community to develop truly global solutions. In response to climate threats, the city has taken up the challenge to become the second lab for the development of smart sustainable city. The Lab has since developed smart solutions using simulation and visualization technologies that aimed to improve the quality of life of its citizens, accessibility to social services, make the city more climate resilient, promote e-mobility, e-governance, and more. However, the Lab recognizes that in order to foster the digital innovation and ensure the smart solutions are effective, it is important to leverage benchmark tools that are able to evaluate smart performance and sustainability at the same time. In 2018, the Lab decided to partner with the U4SSC to pilot the Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities. The KPIs have successfully evaluated the contribution of ICTs in the three key aspects of the city: environment; economic; and social and culture. The results have given the Lab vital information on how to improve its approach to digital technologies and strengthen its capacity to develop more reliable, more effective and more innovative solutions. Most impressively, by piloting the U4SSC KPIs, it has also reported on the city's progress on the SDGs since the KPIs are connected to the SDG targets. This has allowed the Lab to further catalyze actions on the SDGs.

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• Norway

• Older persons
• Women
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities
• City inhabitants

The KPIs are designed to be flexible and replicable. Every city can use the U4SSC KPIs to evaluate their smart initiatives and progress in reaching the SDGs regardless of their geographic location or capacity. The KPIs are divided into two set of indicators; the core indicators; and the advanced indicators. Cities only need to report the core indicators in order to obtain a holistic view on its smart progress. The advanced indicators complement the core indicators but do not constitute as an integral part of the assessment. The high replicability of the U4SSC KPIs is also proven by the fact that over 100 cities worldwide, including Singapore, Moscow, Valencia, have already partnered with the U4SSC in implementing these indicators.

The implementation of the U4SSC is both operationally and environmentally sustainable as it involves only the collection of data with minimal resource usage.

The U4SSC KPIs project promotes WSIS values by providing a standardized approach in assessing the impacts of the smart solutions develop by the Smart City Lab Ålesund. The results have illustrated the effectiveness of ICT solutions in the city, cemented the Lab's commitment that visualization and simulation technologies are vital in designing ICT solutions. This is also key to foster key innovations in the city that have improved sustainability and resiliency, made e-services more accessible, and accelerated progress of the SDGs, all of which are inline with the values of the WSIS forum.