 Good morning everybody. My name is Carlo Ratty. I'm a professor at the Metis. We're around the sensible city lab. And so welcome everybody to the Davos agenda 2021 into this session on building next net zero cities. Today is going to be a very exciting discussion with all of our panelists. Just a little bit of housekeeping first. The session is going to be half an hour. It's going to be open broadcast to everybody around the world. And then this will be followed by another half an hour session later. That's open to all the top link participants. Also, I want to mention that this is part of our initiative at the World Economy Forum on next net zero carbon cities and integrated approach. And so the session is part of this. And for those of you very interested, there's a very, very exciting report that just came out on the topic on how we can build more sustainable cities. So cities, if you need to remember four numbers of cities, remember the following four numbers to 50, 75 and 80 cities only 2% of the surface of the planet, but they're 50% actually today, a little bit over 50% of the population in their 75% of energy consumption, 80% of CO2 emissions. So if we can do something to make our cities a little bit more sustainable, that could be a great deal globally. So having said it, I really wanted to start with our exciting panelists. I want to start with Anna Cuny, who's the mayor of Stockholm. And Anna, first of all, I want to ask you about, you know, your role on the board, if you comment a little bit on this initiative and, you know, on how you see it and how it actually has helped shape some of the initiatives you have been implementing in Stockholm. Thank you so much, Carlo. It's really a privilege to be on the board, to work with this holistic perspective on our mutual challenges. And that is why this is so important, because it helps cities on the path toward a climate positive for the city of Stockholm, but also climate neutral cities around the world, to help them to fulfill our goals. Because while other initiative emphasizes on different solutions for different sectors, this approach is to take, to find a model to a more integrated system where we can look at different sectors and how they interact. For example, ultra efficient buildings, smart energy infrastructure, but of course, also clean electrification. And we hope to succeed in our goals towards job creation, well-being for our citizens, it's about health, and of course, improved resiliency, and to our goal towards climate neutrality. So this really helps us find the measures how to integrate, I mean, everything from energy efficiency in building and retrofitting to new mobility solutions, and also to integrate solution at scale. Often we focus on one building at a time, but it's about how buildings also interact with each other at scale. So it's really interesting when we build new districts in our cities around the world, but also when we retrofit existing areas. Yeah, and your point about scale is very, you know, it's key, and actually we'll talk about this later, is a veterinary city is really a system of systems. And so how do we scale up from individual building to the neighborhood to the whole city? But I want to ask you as well, something about, you know, what we've been living over the past few months, and actually it has been part of some of the discussions we had at the board and is about the pandemic, and how do you see that that could change, for instance, our cities and making them more sustainable. I know one of the points you've been advocating is also how we can reschedule our lives in our cities in order again to make better use of the existing infrastructure. Thank you, Carlo. That's really a good point, because I think many policymakers today really just talk about new infrastructure, and they want new measures from the national level. But I think we can really learn about how we can use our existing infrastructure in a better way. So if you look at the pandemic, we many countries have had a strategy of bending the curve so that demand don't exceed and apply at peak hours or at peak time. You can have that strategy when it comes to healthcare or energy, but also how you plan the city. So we have all this infrastructure at place, but what is more people are working from home before lunch and then coming to the office after lunch, or then you don't have so much pressure on the public transport, or if you reschedule the gymnasiums, because many students research a show and learn better later on the day. So if they start school a little bit later, then you don't have so much pressure on traffic, on public infrastructures, and so on. So we can really use what we have in a more sustainable way, and that's also, of course, when it comes to energy. So I think we should reschedule our cities to use what we have in a more efficient way. Thank you, Anna. Yes, certainly one of the tragedies of the city, or cities in the 20th century, was really having everything synchronized. And so you had peak hour, rush hour, and then there was a lot of congestion. So you can actually reschedule cities thanks to the newfound flexibility following the pandemic. That could be a big deal, have a big impact, and make them more sustainable. Incidentally, is exactly what happens with energy markets. And we'll hear about that in a moment about how IT can help us in that direction. But before that, let me move to Mamunia Sharif, who is, as you all know, Undersecretary General and Executive Director of UN Habitat. Mamunia, it's great to have you here on the panel. And I wonder you to, we heard the lesson from Stockholm. And how would you bring into emerging countries? I believe today you are in Nairobi, where UN Habitat is based, but you've been working a lot with cities in emerging countries. What do you think? How could they achieve the same goals? Thank you very much, Kaho. Thank you very much. I would like to congratulate World Economic Forum for the net zero carbon cities report. And I'm very, very happy, the inclusion of the complexities section. So your questions about the, about how cities reflect and react to new phenomena, I think we should look into the, to analyze the urbanizing trend at the moment. I think we should recognize that over the last 20 years, the city grew three times more than the population. So this is a very excessive and unnecessary footprint. Then you want to like to link it into the energy. And at average, we are also looking into the different geographies and the cities expanded in their territory is more than 10 to 20 kilometers of their former limit. And the density is now is reduced on average of 20 percent. So how the cities in the developing world. And I think this is very important for us to look into the integrated energy approach that mentioned in the net zero cities report that inquire or requires to include the space, the space in the cities as essential variable because systematic efficiency cannot be a smart solution alone on sectoral. So when we look into the cities, I think we would like to like to like to bring to you the, to rethink the notion of proximity over accessibility, connectivity, the location and the function of the cities. The cities in terms of the regular, the solution, regulatory solution, the governance and the multiple use a function. And I would like also to bring to you that with the need of this integrated response, not only related to energy sectors. We need to think in terms of new economic geography and redefine the role and the function of cities and region. And especially in the developing countries, as you know that low and middle income countries accounted only for 14.5 percent of global emission. But account for 90 percent of the future urban growth. So I think that we need to focus on the developing world by putting in place low carbon development trajectory and to meet the human development needs, not only the energy, but also the human and also pursuing the decarbonation of the developed world cannot be an expense of the people and the need to access to clean energy in the developing world. I think this is very important for us to look into the proper financing and regulatory reform in the, in the developing world. This is a very, very less. And also to look into the capacity for the integrated planning, not only energy planning, but urban design, good planning with energy is the component of it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mamunio. So basically, compactness is very, very important. We know the compact cities used in general, on average, much less energy. For those of you who are listening, if you look at this very interesting grass, we see the density of the city and energy consumption per capita. So in your case, making them more compact and certainly looking at this, compact means better in terms of energy sustainability, but also in terms of social sustainability, how the community can interact better together. But Mamunio, would you like to expand a little bit on a, on a related point, which is what we are hearing about today? You know, this has been championed by the mayor of Paris, it's part of C40, but also many other cities. So when you think about the comfort cities, how this city doesn't need to be just, you know, one single area, but actually can be broken down into what some people call the 15 minute city. So in smaller district where you can find most of the things you need. So this has been, you know, a very exciting and ambitious goal. Clearly, you know, a big city is more than the 15 minute city. You know, we might say that perhaps the opera theater, you know, the market and many other exciting things might be beyond the 15 minutes. But inside the 15 minutes, you can get most of the things you need so that actually the city is more sustainable. So it would be great to hear from you actually how this lesson that has been championed in many cities in the, in the North could actually be, be applied to the global south. Yeah, I think what, what is important here is that is, we have to really look at the function of the cities and we shouldn't forget the intermediary cities around. So we have to look into the corridor, the urban corridor. So because we wouldn't be competing among cities. So I think when you look at the function of the cities, then we can allocate, for example, that is the concept of the 15 minute cities. And where, when we're looking going back into the neighborhood sustainable, self-sustained neighborhood. So I think this is very, very important where you can get the education, the, the, the convenience goods. But of course, beyond the 15 minute, you get the higher level of the convenience goods and also the, the, the facilities. So I think what we should understand now is that to understand how the ecosystem of the city, how the city is functioned and whether is it 15 minute city or the donut city. But I think that is the most important is to look into the integrated part of the city. We cannot look energy by itself. So we have to be integrated and going back to the planning and urban design of the cities, which I said does now energy is one of the components of it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So then I like, I like not to, to move to Michael Namak, who's a chairman and chief executive officer of train technologies. And, you know, Michael, if we build them, what we were just here, you know, you start to see the city is this kind of system of systems. So what's your perspective on it? Yeah, it's so interrelated, Carlo. And thank you. And thank you to other panelists as well. Anna's point, I think, was, was right on about the fact that you've got to consider all these things together, the generation and distribution of power, agriculture, mobility, transportation and buildings. Very passionate about buildings in particular because buildings are 40% of the carbon emissions that occur within the world and particularly in cities. And specifically, HVAC is the number one contributor that again, it's 40% of that number. So you find that 15% of the world's carbon emissions happen by heating and ventilating air conditioning buildings, it grows to 25% by 2030 with what we know today to be the code standards and practices in the world. So the ability to take out some of the, the chemicals, the chlorine, the fluorine, the power refrigerants for buildings can eliminate 99% of that issue. The technology exists today and therefore you could actually drop tomorrow that component of greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating chlorine, fluorine from refrigerants and buildings. We're seeing trends around this in the world today, but very passionate that this is a technology that can be implemented and it really is the trigger in my mind around really resetting the baseline for carbon emissions. When you look at transportation, particularly refrigerated foods and medicines, vaccines as an example, you can also solve the problem there with the same chemical composition of refrigerants, but you can in addition electrify, you can electrify buildings, you can electrify transport refrigeration, remove the diesel engines, remove the power sources. When you collect those two components of transportation of food and medicine and buildings together, one third of the world's carbon emissions could be literally brought to zero with technology that exists today. I think there's urgency to do this, the time to act is now, but we don't need incentives to do that because often the total cost of ownership is less than you would find with alternative solutions. So I'm excited about the future. Also a little bit worried as we get through this pandemic because all of the mitigating things that we do around COVID around indoor air quality, around food safety actually increased demand of power generation and therefore carbon emissions. So to neutralize all that, we have to solve that problem in the short term and then get really onto the actions that I described earlier with buildings and transport refrigeration in particular. Wonderful. Thank you, Michael. So basically you're focusing on the hardware, how we can action the hardware both in terms of how it is assembled and also in terms of moving to electrification. But what about the software? How can we use intelligence in order to better synchronize all the different pieces? Yes, that's critical. You can't do this with hardware alone. You have to use the information coming from buildings, around occupancies, around outdoor temperatures and trends to be able to optimize these systems. And so the one thing you're seeing here really through the efforts in net service cities, but also through the pandemic is the acceleration of digital optimization, digital services coming into buildings to keep buildings operating after designs and after models. And so that is a silver lining through this, is the amount of information flowing around buildings about how to optimize that whole equation. So again, this is only one of the system of things here, one of the systems, the subsystems. It's important to think about this all collectively together, but there are, there's expertise throughout the world to attack these subsystems in an integrated way. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Yes. So basically using sensors, using artificial intelligence, we can start having buildings or the built environment can start responding to us in a much more dynamic way, almost like a living thing. And as a result, it can help us save, save a lot of energy. But if you know, if this is happening at the building level, then I'd like to move to our four panelists, to Lei Jiang, because chief executive officer of Envision Group in China, in China. So I'd like to ask you, so we heard this about the building level, but how do we move to the city level? How do we integrate, for instance, modesty and address it with the same approach? Yes, I think the digital infrastructure probably is going to be the most essential part to support a net zero city, because the net zero city is going to run on the renewables. However, the renewables are intermittent, probably coming from the suburb area or even far away planes through the high voltage network. So you need to create adaptive demand to fit into the intermittent supply. So then the entire system have to be real time organized, orchestrated, synchronized. So that's why digital infrastructure is so important. At the same time, if the city to be net zero, you have to electrify your transportation system. So it is going to bring a huge challenge to electrical grid. If the milling ska are charging a similar time zone, it's going to make the electrical system collapsed. However, through the efficient orchestration by the digital network, so this kind of millions of cars can become the mobile storage because 95% of a passenger vehicle, they are sitting idle most of time. They can be the effective storage to support your energy network. At the same time, so we see the digital infrastructure is going to bring the huge flexibility to the city. For instance, as Michael said, the 40% carbon emission is from building. What I can say through our project in Singapore, we found 40% energy needs in Singapore is coming from HVAC. So if we can harness this HVAC system into the adaptive load, you basically can provide almost free storage and free flexibility to the city, which is very meaningful. So to support the intermittent renewable energy. So basically again, software and hardware, we need to electrify more. When we can electrify, we can break intelligence and better match supply and demand. Just as a follow-up thing, as you're taking this broader perspective about the city, now when you're looking ahead and look at, say, COP26, what do you think could be the incentives or how can we actually align stakeholders in order to reach some of the things you're mentioning about the city? As I said, the technology for the smart digital infrastructure is there. For instance, like the Singapore government is being taking the Decada platform to be the IoT platform for the city. But as I said, what's most important thing is about the policy change. We have to create the effective marketing mechanism to make the flexibility as the currency. So we should make the flexibility not only the daily flexibility, but also seasonal flexibility as the trading currency to encourage the long-term or short-term investment on this intelligent infrastructure or other storage technology. Then the city can deal with the intermittent renewable energy system. So basically, if you look at this, one key word we heard from different directions is really flexibility. We can run a more flexible city, live a more flexible life, also thinking about the post-undemic life. But probably flexibility is not enough unless we got the hardware and software that are able to respond in a more dynamic way. So I'd like to say we got a few more minutes. Any additional comments on this in the discussion? Maybe Anna, going back to you, how do you see some of what we just heard from Changi as an opportunity for Stockholm? I think that was great remarks. And actually, we have a test bed now together with great owners where we connect schools and thousands of households and companies to have a marketplace when it comes to flexibility, when it comes to energy capacity. We call it Stockholm Flex. So it's not about to demand and supply and buy if you have capacity over, it's about actually to not use energy during peak. It could be seasonal, but it also could be on a daily basis. So for example, if some household doesn't use energy at a certain time, they get payment for that. So it's a new kind of test bed when it comes to market solutions for flexibility. Just one solution where we as a city are very active with our schools and households and other stakeholders. That's really great. So basically, we got the flexible platform, then we also need to have the proper incentives in place in order to take advantage of that flexibility. You're in the Robi, which is kind of, some people call it a bit the Silicon Valley of Africa. There's a lot of experimentation also. There have been a lot of, there's been a lot of, you know, new developments in terms of micro payments, mobile payments, and so on. I mean, do you think there's such digital platforms could play a role in cities in the global south? Yeah, when I would like to start with, to continue with the software and the hardware that we are talking about just now and link it to the digitalization. I think it's very, very important for the cities in the global south is also to look into the capacity and also the capacity in terms of the hardware and the software. Of course, the hardware in terms of this investment, in terms of the governance, the software, in terms of the leadership regulatory, and of course, in terms of the hardware is the investment. I think this is very important to the global south, because if you know that it's the energy consumption at the very city level, the city level is around 70 percent. And we also consume 70 percent of the energy and also 70 percent of the carbon emission. And yet, and now 70 percent of the infrastructure is still to be built. And what type of infrastructure that we want to link into the energy saving? I think this is very important because in the global south, there are lack of proper financing and regulatory reform. And we need to decentralize the power system, but also need to the capacity to undertake integrated evaluation. So I would like to see that that is the difficulties. We also look into the building codes that is mentioned by Li Zhang just now. Where is the importance of it? And also the complication in terms of the business model at the global south. So we need and the resources are very, very scarce. And data is also very important in this case in order to move forward. So what I would like to conclude is that we have to rethink in terms of the geography, getting into the better productivity, different urban and territorial function. And also all function must be included, not only the net zero function, not only the energy design, but rather integrated and planning and urban design with energy component within the space element. I think that is very, very important, not only in global south, I think in the world. Thank you very much. You know, those are very, very interesting points. And Michael, very quickly as we are running, we're getting close to the end. So, you know, you've seen there seems to be a lot of demand from cities, you know, in different countries in the global south. You know, some of the solutions you mentioned at the building level, so you need to deal with private ownership might be easier. But when you need to apply the same thing at the global level, you know, what type of, you know, PPPs or what type of approaches could you think about to bring your solutions in terms of hardware and software to cities? First of all, the economics have to work and maybe just a couple of quick points. Stockholm is an example. I don't know that you allow fossil fuel heating anymore, replacing boilers with fossil fuel. And it's 300 to 400 percent more efficient to not do that and to put new technology in. Or as an example, Li Zhang mentioned using cars as batteries. You can use buildings as batteries actually storing latent heat and cooling and buildings to be used when you need it. The innovation is remarkable. It just needs now to really the economics are working. We just have to have policies and standards that allow for that innovation to take place. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. So we need to wrap up this first half an hour, but it seems to me that the things and the actions are really, really clear. And there seems to be a lot of demand from cities. It's about the hardware. How can we make a hardware that's more flexible? Also, thanks to some of the new conditions we are living in now, following the pandemic, the higher flexibility we have in our lives. And then, you know, thanks to the software, how we can then run the city in a much more efficient way.