 Hi everyone. Guten Morgen willkommen. Thank you for attending our panel today. We would like to demonstrate geospatial technologies and their role in supporting climate action. I'm Jill Jones. I'm with the World Geospatial Industry Council, WGIC. We are a not-for-profit trade association that represents geospatial companies up and down the value chain, software, technology, services, data. And we have with us today three members of WGIC from Fugro, Esri, and Bentley. We have a number of committees that we work on, these three industry members with us today work with me on partnerships. They're all very engaged member companies that are involved in in 2023. We undertook a partnership with the Global Covenant of Mayors, or GCOM, to collaborate on our shared goals and to demonstrate how these geospatial companies are providing solutions that can answer the call to climate action in cities. We have Juan Pablo today with us from GCOM. As they're known, it's a big part of the solution in supporting cities in their climate journey. They're working to combat climate change one city at a time. They are part of C40 and are under the auspices of the EU and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the largest global alliance for city climate leadership with over 13,000 city signatories. And what a year to be partnering with GCOM. I think 2023 has been a banner year for climate change. NASA indicated that this summer was the hottest summer on record. And we are on pace to have the hottest year in history. There have been devastating wildfires, floods, droughts, extreme conditions and records broken with many governments demanding additional information and tools to respond to these challenging climate crises. So today, we're going to hear from our three member companies and with some case studies regarding the tools and technologies that they've used to address some of these issues. So we'll start with Puja Mahapatra from Fugro. Then we'll hear from Chris from Esri Yence with Bentley. And last but definitely not least, Juan Pablo from GCOM who will give the perspective from the cities and the alliances that represent those cities. Let's start with Puja first. Thanks so much, Puja. I'd love to show you some really concrete examples of how Fugro and our technologies are helping cities with some of their pressing needs of the hour. And I think Jill has given a wonderful introduction of some of the challenges that cities face. A bit of an introduction about the company. I'm hoping I don't have to introduce Fugro to most of you here. We're quite a big company, about 11,000 really smart people across the globe. We're headquartered in the Netherlands, but we work essentially on almost every continent on the globe. So I'll start straight away with a problem that a lot of us have. And I think this applies as much to city context as any other. Data. There's a lot of data out there. Cities have access to a large amount of data. But many of our end clients come to us because they feel that they're data rich, but they're information poor. So what is the best way to be able to actually get insights from all of this large data that we see all around us all the time? The key is really to convert these points and pixels into actionable information. And I love showing this as an example to illustrate this. About 80% of the data that you require just sits on a shelf. The key is to take it down the value chain all the way to actionable information that end users can actually use. In fact, the end user doesn't even have to know where the data comes from, what platform you're acquired from, or what resolution it's at as long as it solves the problem that they have and that they face. And that brings us to the concept of digital twins. And looking at everyone out here, I'm sure you've heard of the term digital twin in your day-to-day life. It probably means a different thing to each one of you in this room, depending on what you use your data for, what your end uses. And I'm assuming with the example of cities as well, different cities across the globe. We talked about 13,000 cities that you represent as GCOM. They're probably all in different levels of geospatial maturity, if you want to call it that. Some cities might be interested in data, just understanding their cities a little bit better, where things are located. Whereas some might be interested to go deeper down the value chain to analytics, to digital twins, all the way until maybe even some cities are embracing the concept of the metaverse, where it's really an interconnected set of digital twins with that seamless interface between them. And we, as Fugro, pride ourselves to be able to contribute at pretty much every step in this journey. And I'll try to illustrate that through a few examples. So what we do is we acquire data, and irrespective of platforms, we acquire data from satellites, planes, drones, ships, undersea robots, land surveyors, we have all the tools in the toolbox to acquire data. And then we go through that entire value chain around modeling, analytics, and then deliver data to our clients in whatever format that they want it in, whether it's data in a hard drive, which is less and less the case, or whether it's through the cloud and through APIs. As I mentioned before, we have access to a very broad range of technologies. We have our own innovation teams that help in actually providing cutting-edge state-of-the-art technologies to any of our clients, depending on the use case. And we're not limited to above ground, we also do work in the subsurface. We really select the right platform for the right job. And geodata consultancy is a key part of this. So the first step of any engagement we have with clients is to really listen to what is the problem that they're trying to solve, and then work backwards to choose the right sensor for the right job. If you dive into the world of aerial data, which is something I think cities are quite interested in, even within there, we try to choose the right technique, whether it's lighter, whether it's photogrammetry, whether it's imagery, to build the right, or to provide cities with information that they need. High point density LiDAR is we're finding to be a very powerful tool in the toolbox. And as you can see, using this sort of high density LiDAR, you're really able to model the real world for city planners for all the way to this particular application here was for a microgrid planning in the city of Houston in Texas. So it's really about providing that immersive experience for decision makers to make decisions around their city environment. And all of this is obviously based on geodata. There's a lot of derived products that you can get from LiDAR when you talk about climate risk, flood modeling, these kind of applications. And we obviously also capture a variety of other ancillary information along with LiDAR. Various examples to show you how LiDAR can also be used for, for instance, urban green spaces and the various other urban planning applications. We pride ourselves in being the market leaders or even technological leaders in LiDAR point classification. We have a scalable solution that can classify to very, very high accuracy using machine learning. LiDAR point clouds into various features, whether it's buildings or roads or trees or feature extraction from LiDAR point clouds. And what can that be used for? And I can give you a very good example of how we're using this in cities, in this particular example in the United States, where we are able to build building models from the LiDAR data, very high accurate in the Z direction as well. And when somebody in trouble calls 911, that location of the call is very accurately depicted in such an environment. So as you can imagine, if you're an emergency planner, you need to send somebody to save that person's life. Every bit of time saved can save a life. Even a second can save a life. So providing that situational awareness for these first responders to immediately go very quickly to the 13th floor of a certain building and know exactly where the fire extinguishers are, that's the sort of situational awareness that we are providing through the system. All of that's obviously based on your data. We also use similar technology for our power utility clients. We model their entire networks, and we're talking about, for instance, the entire United States or the entire Australia, really modeling that in very, very high resolution and providing them with actionable insights, which part of my power utility network is at risk because of vegetation encroachment. So really providing that situational awareness for large power utilities. Similarly, we do work with road authorities. We have access to very high technology vans, like the picture that you see on the top right, where you can really acquire high resolution imagery in LiDAR that can even detect micro cracks on road surfaces. So as you can imagine, for preventive maintenance, this is a very important tool in the toolbox. We do similar work for our railway customers. We have a plug-and-play solution called our RILA system. It takes two minutes to attach this to a train, and then it acquires a very high resolution point cloud video and all kinds of information along the railway corridor, which can help asset owners to really monitor the changes in railway tracks, do, again, preventive maintenance and that sort of stuff. All of that without having to close the railway line at all. So it just goes at line speed of a train. So it doesn't stop there. We do the digital twin side of things, but we also go into the subsurface, study slope stability, study soil properties. All of that provides that 360 degree, literally 360 degree information for asset owners. I talked a lot about applications on land. As we know, a lot of cities are on coastal areas. In fact, most of humanity started off near a water source. And we know with climate change it's these populations that are most vulnerable to flooding and to effects of sea level rise and extreme weather events. So our services are not limited to land, but it's also in that coastal zone and in the shallow water, in the deep water, using a variety of different sensors. We're able to acquire data and provide the insights that our clients need. I can show you this through an example of the hurricane in that Irma, sorry, that hit St. Martin in 2017, caused massive destruction. But we were able to provide them with the digital twin that they need to be able to actually make actionable insights. So data is great, insights are great, but if people don't understand it because it's too complicated or it's not presented in the right way, that again doesn't really help anybody. So what we try to do is really provide that very intuitive sort of interface by which decision makers can really look at the data, look at predictions, scenarios around sea level rise and really make decisions based on infrastructure that can be affected, that they should be focusing on, that are particularly vulnerable. So I'll end with an example, an actual example of work we did in a Pacific island called Tuvalu. And this is a very special example for us because we work together with the UNDP to really help the island build their coastal adaptation measures that they're going to require so that they don't disappear in the next 50 years or so because of sea level rise. So I'll let the video talk for itself and with that I'm happy for continuing the conversation afterwards if you're interested in any one of these specific topics. In order to put effective adaptation methods into action, the Tuvaluan government requires accurate mapping of this surrounding coastline and near shore areas. 2015 the TC panel which devastated our coastal frontier and had a huge storm surge washing ashore and damaging a lot of infrastructure, buildings and our crop plantations. So if we don't understand the problem to begin with, it's very hard to come up with the correct answers on how to fix it. The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, TCAP, is working to develop innovative coastal protection solutions. TCAP partnered with Fugro who used their airborne LiDAR technology to provide accurate coastal data to the team in Tuvalu. LiDAR is an acronym and it means light detection and ranging. And simply put a LiDAR system is a laser that is usually mounted on a plane. This is a Fugro and Airborne LiDAR bathymetric system that we used to collect the data over Tuvalu. The system fires laser pulses from the aircraft to the water and through the water column until they are reflected off the seabed or the coastal area being mapped. The system is able to model very accurately the shape of the island. It's like scanning the island from the plane. Fugro's airborne LiDAR bathymetric systems are the safest and most efficient survey systems in shallow and complex environmental zones. Tuvalu is one of the few countries where we've collected this data and we can understand the relationship between sea level rise and land elevation on any island in any village in any location which means we can provide the information Tuvaluans need to adapt. In just two weeks the survey aircraft covered all of the land, reefs and lagoons across all nine atolls of Tuvalu. The survey also captured aerial photographs and when combined with the LiDAR data provided a powerful three-dimensional tool to support adaptation planning. This baseline data will help to develop a greater understanding of sea level rise and shoreline change in order to plant a range of adaptation and resilient measures in Tuvalu. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Puja. I think one of the most fascinating parts of Fugro is the fact that you have expertise in land, sea and the intersection between the two of those and of course coastal resiliency is of greatest importance right now as you said I think over 90 percent of the world's population lives on or near a coast so thank you so much. Chris Jackson you're up next from Esri. Thank you Jill. Raise your hand if you work for a city. Okay. Raise your hand if you work in a city. Okay. Raise your hand if you live in a city or in the suburbs of a city. Okay. Right. So I'd like to spend the next seven or eight minutes to talking about the challenge that we have of creating sustainable cities. This guy at the end is the real expert. Okay. I'm a geographer and I like to look at problems and how geography can help with with solving some of the biggest problems that we face and that problem today is about creating sustainable cities but I want to start with the definition because sustainability means many things to many people so in the context of these slides my choice of words for this I'm a big fan of John Elkington if any of you have heard of John and he coined the triple bottom line expression of people, planet and profit. It's been extended to a quadruple bottom line of people, planet, profit and purpose. So for me becoming sustainable is about reframing the success criteria. It's moving away from the traditional economic model of profit being king to thinking about these different dimensions of success around social equity, environmental stewardship, economic prosperity naturally and resilience and then having a strong sense of purpose and responsibility. So that's quite a lot to think about as you as a city manager or as the mayor of a city but the thing about thinking this way and this is why John famously withdrew his triple bottom line analogy because people were using it as a means to just report or to measure things they weren't really changing their mindset they were just using it as a way to it wasn't greenwashing that term didn't exist back in the the 80s and 90s but it wasn't far off because people were really just using people, planet and profit as a means of measuring and reporting the great things they were doing they weren't really changing their mindset and it's because I'm sorry I'm standing in front of my slides. He famously said this in 2018 fundamentally we have a hard-wired problem of culture in business and in finance. We still rely on finance being a primary measure of success and for as long as we think that way it's very hard to tradition to sustainable ways of thinking and Partha Dasgupta reached a very similar conclusion in the Dasgupta report of GDP really is no longer fit for purpose and yet we still use it as the primary measure to indicate success or successful growth. So this is the sort of backdrop if you will for for what I'd like to share with you and this is not work that Esri is doing it's all of the work that our customers are doing with GIS technology to move along this journey to transitioning to becoming a sustainable organization or a sustainable government or a sustainable city and I want to look at this through three different lenses if you will and the first is really just to talk about GIS as that enabling technology to become sustainable and it's incredibly complicated the world around us isn't it there's so many interconnections between the natural and the built and the human environments that we still just don't understand there's incredible complexity in natural systems but geography and the use of GIS technology is one of the ways that we can start to understand that complexity and that interrelationship so we certainly believe it's a very powerful tool to help people migrate their thinking towards that interconnected systems based circular way of development but to try and boil it down into some manageable chunks you know how we eat the elephant in bite-sized chunks I've drawn it down to four things and the first is thinking about social equity and an expression called the just transition which is about providing equitable access to goods and services it's delivering resilient infrastructure but it's with a focus around equitable urbanization so taking account of demographic information and how people move around cities and thinking about environmental justice and the rising temperatures in in urban areas the next way of thinking of it is specifically around climate change adaptation everybody's very very focused around decarbonization which is absolutely right because we do need to do that but it's really only one element of environmental stewardship there's a great expression that I like which is carbon tunnel vision where an organization will focus on decarbonizing but not really understand that there's many other damaging processes and workflows that they use which are equally damaging to the environment and this relates also to the renewable energy transition so helping utility companies to think about how they generate and then transmit energy the third one of these is around specifically ecosystem regeneration and I'm certainly a believer that becoming sustainable actually isn't enough we have to become regenerative in our thinking we have to put back more than we've taken out because otherwise we're not really making things better we're just keeping everything at the status quo the word sustainable doesn't imply making things better it just requires it's talking about keeping things making things no worse let's say so I'm a great believer in regenerative thought and regenerative systems thinking because frankly we're not doing enough fast enough in my opinion but this is around thinking about how we use natural resources and what our relationship is with natural resources it's around moving towards more of a circular economy it's around thinking about waste and how we deal with waste and how we minimize waste and and always trying to think of nature-based solutions so thinking more about what we do as being part of nature rather than us just taking from nature it's a very it's a very interesting mind shift and the last one is is really around resilience and risk management and this is about preserving human life okay this is where it really starts to get real and Pooja's had some great examples already of natural disaster preparedness you know we've we've already seen this year how many natural disasters have affected so many millions of people and that is only going to continue so we need to continue to build resilience into our built environment whilst being respectful that that is operating within a natural environment which we're helping to change but that will carry on on its own the second lens is really digital twins and Pooja used this word already who said the word digital twins today already who's heard the word digital twins already today okay right I get paid to use the word digital twin every day because it's just what we say right but here this is about creating connected digital twins so the power of geography and GIS really lies in its ability to connect digital twins together to give you a platform of insight to be able to understand what's going on in the real world and what's going on in our built environment so it does start with environmental twins thinking about the natural resources thinking about ecology and habitats this is in your way isn't it i'm sorry you can't see this line um thinking about weather patterns and how these things affect the environment and how they affect our ability to work within the natural environment the second sort of twin that I think of in respect of sustainable cities is in the design and construction field so this is around early site selection where should we build new neighborhoods how do we know that we're orienting our streets in the right direction to make the best use of solar radiation and to minimize energy consumption just through the orientation of buildings how do we then move towards the bim and cad environment where we can analyze uh products and material choice using EPD environmental product declarations or the forthcoming EU digital passports for products and how do we then move that into the construction phase of delivering new infrastructure how do we minimize waste on site how do we minimize disruption to communities how do we minimize noise and so on all of these things have a natural geography to them which is really important to help deliver effectively and to keep the pace of build going I heard a year ago I don't know whether any of you've heard this statistic that in order to keep pace with global population growth and urbanization we effectively have to build an urban area the size of Paris every week until 2050 which just seems utterly unachievable and somehow we are doing it we are building the urban environment at a phenomenal rate the third part is around network management so this is more in the utility space of thinking how do our network our energy networks connect into our city so that we have equitable access to energy and be able to measure our consumption of energy so that's to do with utilities and telecoms pipelines and so on and the fourth then is really about the city operations themselves now luckily for me there's only one or two hands went up of city operators so I'm possibly not going to put my foot in it here but this is around thinking about mass transit and how do we make sure that our bus scheduling systems are equitable for people to be able to get from their home safely to work how do we think about the real estate or the residential occupancy of buildings and whether they're big whether they're truly efficient or whether we've just got redundant space in buildings that sort of thing and the third one conscious of the time the third one is really around community engagement and how GIS can become a platform for helping city mayors construction firms ecologists and communities to understand what is being proposed for their city so we have this idea of hubs that are enabled through maps and geographic analysis to help people understand actually what's going on where so I'll finish just with two examples and they're both European examples which I'm very proud of our customers for achieving this work the first is in the city of Prague Prague has a real challenge with increased street temperatures and their protection of citizens first of all helping people to have healthy lifestyles as they travel around the city and also retaining the attractiveness of the city for inward investment so they use GIS very simply to measure the street temperatures using sensors and using some remotely sensed imagery to just find out where the hot spots were in the city they then looked at the demographics of the city to find out where vulnerable populations were or where the elderly might need you know might be experiencing warmer street temperatures than is comfortable for them and through this process I identified you can see on the screen lots of hot spots of areas where they felt that they could create really meaningful nature-based solutions to make the city more inhabitable and these were in the form of simple tree canopy cover along pavements it was through putting grass verges next to tram lines and on as an average across the city of Prague they've reduced the street temperatures by between one and two degrees centigrade just through using some very simple geographic thinking on how they could make the city more livable and similarly in Vienna Vienna has a problem in that they can't the city can't grow outwards it's naturally kind of constrained so they're looking at brownfield industrial land as a means to increase their capacity for urbanization and population growth so they've remodeled the this entire site which used to be an airport and they're using GIS as a means of measuring and tracking the development of the city but also as a means to measure decarbonization potential and thinking about circular design as they build roadways in fact the lake you can see in the middle here was built as part of the city development and they used all of the aggregate from the lake to create the foundation layer for the streets and the road infrastructure so they were already thinking in a circular way about we don't need to waste the materials that we extract we can reuse them and repurpose them and now this is a swimming lake that the citizens enjoy so that's what i've got Jill it's some examples of real use of geographic thinking to help to better understand that complexity of the natural built and urban environments and definitely we're finding our customers are using GIS more and more in this way thank you thank you so much chris one of the things i love about you and frankly every person i've ever met from esri is what incredible storytellers you are and the entire company is able to take this complex data from multiple sources and tell a story with it in a way that's easy for the end user to understand so you don't have to understand the specifics of the technology you give a beautiful and elegant response that anybody can understand with your storytelling thank you thank you jen sour from bentley hi thank you jents yeah hello everybody my name is jen sour i'm product manager at bentley systems and taking care about industry solutions and especially for airports and campuses and just one slide of our company i don't want to bore you with numbers but just to give you an idea that we are nearly spread around the whole globe so we are present in 100 and over 90 190 countries and today for is a big event at our company in singapore and you will hear a lot of noise and a lot of information about the digital twilden of singapore the next days so they will present exciting stuff there today i brought you an example from berlin because we are in berlin of course and we have a very good use case in berlin but it's not limited to berlin so for example our existing users are city of stockholm city of health and key city of Dublin they are using our digital twin and the funny story not the funny but the unusual story about Dublin is that it's the fire department who is the driving force behind it so maybe a non-typical use case but yeah it's interesting what what focuses can be and also city of counters in lituania there is the university of counters who is also driving this digital twin of the city and the campus and there's a very impressive use case which i can share with you because counters is is willing to share their data they're willing to share their twin and you can take a look at the counters digital twin on your own yeah but today as i said we are in berlin and in berlin there is a very exciting project happening at the moment and this is the project called Siemensstadt and Siemensstadt is a is a district of the town which is owned by Siemens of Martha it is an old industrial area and there is a huge plan for building a total new district or new quarter of the city and it should lose their industrial flavor let's say and it will be a mixture of industrial buildings but also residential buildings educational buildings recreational entertainment everything you can imagine so it should be a really new concept of a modern city and you can imagine this is a time consuming and ongoing process so they targeted about 25 25 years until completion but in for city scale i think it's pretty normal and yeah before i say too much let's take a look at this project that we have a nice movie for that welcome to Siemensstadt square a one million square meter future city district featuring a complete digital city twin in partnership with the city of berlin and district of spandau Siemens is developing Siemensstadt one of the oldest and most famous industrial sites in the region into a state of the art urban urban district with each of Siemensstadt square zones having different themes and designs some areas will be demolished and rebuilt while many will be retained and restored all can be accessed through its digital twin from existing site data through plan developments to ongoing projects Bentley's digital twin solution will help teams to connect and collaborate on data regardless of source format or complexity with game like navigation intuitive tools enable team members to locate buildings by name or number and access key information on usage materials or year of construction overlay 2d information like parking areas street names and building boundaries or review existing utility information across the site or within buildings one at a time or in any combination review asset performance data from iot connected sensors and devices plus surveys and inspection data on the condition of existing utilities as Siemensstadt square projects progress the digital twin provides transparency for all helping to optimize every aspect of design construction operations and management urban planners have access to street layouts and landscaping information helping to improve decision making and enable clearer communication with different stakeholders architects can explore open spaces parks and plazas review designs overlaying master plans and zoning maps to better understand proposals project managers can visualize construction sequences or access dashboards to understand building use where live links provide up-to-date information on key performance indicators as the urban transformation of Siemensstadt continues in the real world additional layers of data will be captured and reflected in the digital world increasing the benefits of Siemensstadt's digital twin further still our Siemensstadt twin will give us the opportunity to simulate and significantly optimize the planning and operations of our district the digital twin technology will serve one purpose to be a unique blueprint for a sustainable and inclusive urban district where life work research and industry happen side by side come co-create the digital mind shift with us Siemensstadt square yeah so this is the Siemensstadt square project so and maybe to add to all the information we already had it's you can imagine like this that there are multiple levels of details or level of information in this digital twin for example Siemens as the owner of course has the 100% level of information but you can drill down or narrow down the level of information for different stakeholders and different personas and so for example if you have an external contractor or any company working for you you can narrow down the information so that not everything is visible for him and especially interesting for for the citizens there is also a published version of the itwin of the digital digital twin and this published version can be accessed by normal citizens without any account without any license without anything they can review the digital twin they can make commands on it they can they can sketch some ideas they can vote on certain versions of a building or certain design alternatives and they can rank up and down things and so there is a really interesting set of features for citizens to communicate with the city with the owner operator so that they are involved from the first day on and can participate in this project because without customer or citizen involved and citizen involvement this would never be successful and this is also an additional aspect which was not mentioned in the movie so yeah that's from my side so if you're interested you can visit us we are here in the next hall 25 on booth 82 we have I have this image that model live there we can take a look at it you can share the public link with you if you're interested also the countless use of university link if you're interested yeah thanks so something that impresses me about Bentley is the culture of the thread of sustainability that they push through their entire company they really try to attach sustainability for every case study that they have on our committee on WGIC we are currently writing a white paper along with GCOM our partner and Bentley gave me 198 examples of case studies that they tied to sustainability they have a chief sustainability officer I think any company can do this it's just a matter of the will and the culture to frame things in such a way that it relates back and ties back to sustainable development thanks Jens one Pablo from GCOM thank you welcome hi everybody hello I'm Juan Pablo JP from the global covenant of mayors and it's great to be with you here today and with this great panel and be learning a lot about what the geospatial industry can do and all these tools and data sets and and data processing that can really support cities in their climate action journey I'm going to talk to you today about why it is paramount that we act immediately on climate change what's the role that cities and local governments have as well as companies as she was mentioning really focusing on on sustainability on and on going into a low emissions and resilient world and as well the opportunity and the call to connect and to work together to find the data and tools solutions that cities need to move forward and accelerate climate action globally as she mentioned before we are the global covenant of mayors the largest alliance in the world for city climate action with the idea of promoting and supporting voluntary action to combat climate change and move to a resilient and low emission world we have more than 12,800 signatories and with the new addition of 331 this year we are moving to the figure of 13,000 local authorities and governments that are sorry to cities and local governments that are members of gcom and we are moving as as I said further and faster that national government gcom is a strong signal to national governments that cities are actually are leading and are leading together 83% of our signatories have more ambitious targets that their own the countries they are at and 55% of them want to move faster than their own countries I think there is everybody is quite aware at the moment that we are off track of reaching the the Paris agreement and as well as you mentioned as well before of the devastating consequences that not reaching those targets will have on humanity and these impacts as we've been seeing through efforts and solutions to mitigate them and to solve them include extreme heat rising sea levels and as as a corollary to this food insecurity particularly in the global south so the decade to 2030 is really key to solving the this challenge and we need to have emissions by 2030 and move to net zero by 2050 so no individual actor no matter how big no matter how big is if it is a country if it is a company or if it is academia everybody needs to work together to solve this challenge nobody can do it alone so that's why we think that multi-level collaboration is a key driver to this solution and that's why as part of the work we are doing we are collaborating and partner partnering with WGIC to work together with the geospatial industry to find solutions and to unlock the data and the tools that city needs to move forward in this climate action journey as we as we all know as well half of the population currently live in a city and by 2050 80 percent of populations will live in a city and as well a big amount of these populations live in coastal areas which have further exposed to the effects of climate so to reach in the Paris agreement cities need to take transformational action reduce the transport emission improve building efficiency remove fossil fuels from the energy supplies and also minimize waste that goes to incineration or to landfill but as well improve their capacity to adapt to to climate change so we have put together this little roadmap to simplify what is the climate action journey that cities take when they are trying to organize their approach and they really are building in in their own plans in their own business plans sustainability and climate action and we're going to highlight now a couple of key steps that are part of this climate action journey and where the geospatial industry can really support cities moving forward and this also aligns with the three pillars that g-coms works on which is reducing GIG emissions adaptation to climate change and access to energy so many cities as I were mentioning before understand the urgency to act on climate change but not all of them have the capacity and the access to data in order to move forward in this journey we have put together in 2020 a white paper with WRI a decision making and tools white paper where we really went and work with practitioners with cities and with the tools providers to understand what are the main challenges that cities are facing when trying to move forward in their climate action journey and I want to highlight only three or four things from those challenges the first one is all the needs from data and software and this is particularly to support the and build the evidence base that cities need in order to plan accordingly and to understand where to put their efforts and the money and as well to access finance so the evidence base both for mitigation and adaptation is a big part of the of the data and tools that city needs as well as the modeling on top of that so as we were seeing before with with rising sea levels models and with digital twins how can we support cities in processing that data and better understanding data and over on top of that make decisions make plans that will need as well the support of of tools and data in order to monitor how what the what the impact those models have and what's the cost benefit analysis of those solutions and as well the climate action plan itself which is a big project management help the cities have in order to organize that evidence base plan accordingly monitor and adjust their plans accordingly to delve a little bit more into what are the what is a greenhouse gas emissions inventory and the climate risk studies that city need to build their evidence base here is a like a high level mention of what are the the data points that city need in order to build this evidence base and of course this is a lot of these can be tackled by geospatial information others not but of course demographic trends outcomes data this is a quality public health conjection transportation consumption data this is another chunk of information that's really important for for inventories but moving on to the climate risk assessments of course as we were mentioning I we think this is really an area that is going to possibly overtake emissions as a key driver of information and action on on on on on climate and sadly because of how exposed a lot of cities are and how other industries are being drivers of these climate risk assessments and those being insurance companies the financial sector really pushing governments to have this this studies in place have this information and in order to secure assets and and and investments so this all this information is on our white paper that I invite you to to visit and read on our website on gcom website so what is so how do we move forward there's really a big momentum particularly this year with local action for the first time in cop in December there's going to be a local climate action summit so cities are going to be represented in the conference of the parties of the United Nations this is really a milestone in the work of cities in climate change that is going to put them really as key actors of of stopping and combating climate change as well there has been work on the from the UN on the importance of accountability and integrity on data and this is a big as well milestone for using accurate and and and more transparent data that come from reliable sources and this is where as well geospatial data has could have a big role in supporting the the accuracy and the transparency that of data that cities are currently using and so making tools easier and that's another important bit we had to bear in mind that on the other side and city officials are not handling a lot of priorities and are not generally trained or experts in these fields so we really need as Jill was mentioning before to the example of Chris we really need to make information easier to understand and tools easier to use for cities we have to find the ways to talk in the same language and we are already starting to do to doing that at this level and we need to move forward and connect cities to companies and and and exchange these experiences uh I want uh finally to invite you to connect with GCOM we have uh two ways of working uh with companies we have them the marketplaces that are taking place uh in all the regional uh climate weeks uh and you can scan in that um that ur code you can submit a pitch uh that will be available on our website for cities and as well if you want to be part uh in person or virtually of our uh marketplaces you can present you pitch on the marketplaces and have listened to pitches of other companies and of cities presenting their needs and have conversations with cities uh uh and officials themselves to discuss uh the solutions and as well we just uh had uh today uh we finished our innovate for cities conference was a three day event virtual event that finished today finished today uh in three time zones so to cover really globally uh and we are going to have one in person and virtual on 2024 in Montreal uh in September so I really uh invite you uh to connect and to uh present your pitches to connect to GCOM uh and yeah present innovative ways as the once we have just uh so to support cities in the climate action journey thank you very much