• Cisco’s Connected Urban Development R&D program formally becomes a SMART 2020 initiative of The Climate Group
• SMART 2020 initiative aims to match leading cities with leading corporations to deliver 10 smart tech pilot projects by 2012
• SMART 2020 projects will address regulatory, financial and policy challenges to support scale-up
• The first new projects will be announced during Climate Week NYC in New York in September

Read the full press release.

SHANGHAI, 16 June 2010 – Cisco and international non-governmental organization The Climate Group convened some of the world’s leading cities in China today to expand their landmark network of smart cities, states and regions in a bid to reverse growing levels of urban greenhouse gas pollution.

Cities are currently responsible for two-thirds of global energy use and more than 70 per cent of green house gas emissions, according to most estimates. This looks set to grow, as the percentage of the global population living in urban areas is predicted to grow from 50% currently, to 59% by 2030.

At the Shanghai Expo, Cisco officially handed over management of its successful Connected Urban Development initiative to The Climate Group, an arrangement announced last year. There was a call from all parties for innovative partnership proposals to advance a series of state-of-the-art trials of smart low carbon technologies that will significantly cut urban carbon emissions.

The Climate Group will build on Cisco’s leadership of Connected Urban Development by working through its own existing network of cities, states and regions and leading corporations across the banking, electronics, systems integration, IT, telecommunications, planning and energy services sectors to demonstrate solutions in transformational technical areas such as smart connected buildings, smart transportation and smart grid.

Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group: “Urban emissions are changing our planet. Already more than half the world’s population lives in cities, where there is a burning opportunity for governments and companies to benefit their economies and urban environments by taking action to reduce emissions.  Already we’re seeing leading companies, cities and regions responding to this opportunity and look forward to helping them work more closely together to scale up the solutions.”

John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco: “We are proud of the achievements of the Connected Urban Development initiative, which has demonstrated that network technology can enable sustainable solutions in urban environments. Cisco, a committed partner with cities around the world, is leading the way in the progression to Smart+Connected Communities. We are pleased The Climate Group will drive the next phase of this work, to broaden the alliance to a wide network of urban innovators. We encourage other technology partners to join this Smart 2020 vision to illustrate how technology is a fundamental driver to sustainable communities.”

Cisco has a long track record of working in cities, including San Francisco, Seoul, Amsterdam, Madrid, Hamburg, Birmingham and Lisbon.  The Climate Group is working in Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, New York and Mumbai under the $100m HSBC Climate Partnership.

Stephen Green, Group Chairman, HSBC: “Cities are critical to cutting greenhouse gas emissions and building the low carbon economy. That is why we support The Climate Group’s work in some of the world’s great cities through the HSBC Climate Partnership. We are pleased that The Climate Group and Cisco are working together to develop innovative information technologies in urban centres.”

Recognizing the imperative for action, Metropolis, the World Association of Major Metropolises representing more than 100 cities across the world, announced its support for the next phase of the initiative.

Josep Roig, Secretary General, Metropolis: “Our members have seen the benefit in partnering with Cisco on climate change and we look forward to working with The Climate Group to advance ‘smart’ action across global cities.  Climate change is an issue of concern for all big cities and metropolitan areas and we will continue to open our forum to discussions on how best to mitigate our impacts.”

The Climate Group will take this work forward under their SMART 2020 program, building on groundbreaking research released in 2008 that identified that information and communications technologies (ICT) could cut global emissions by 15% by 2020.

Cities will meet with technology companies tomorrow at a ‘Partnership for Urban Innovation’ conference hosted jointly by The Climate Group, Cisco and Metropolis to share ideas and formulate potential projects.

Participants in the conference and The Climate Group’s members said the following:

Volker Buscher, Director, Arup: “To meet our emission targets we need to show individuals the role they can play and the executive if they are making progress in dealing with climate change objectives.  This requires real information, excellent user interfaces and smart instrumentation.  ICT is key in delivering the knowledge we need to compete in the ecological age.”

Stan Gale, Chairman, Gale International: “We’re working with Cisco in Songdo IBD, a 1,500 acre smart, sustainable city in South Korea.  Starting from scratch, we have a unique opportunity to implement and measure the full impact of new approaches to smart city development and operations.  We expect to feed these learnings into The Climate Group’s new SMART 2020 platform to help existing and future cities become more sustainable.”

Rod Leaver, CEO Australia, Lend Lease: "A better life is not possible without better cities; and achieving this common goal, faster than would otherwise be possible, requires new partnerships between government, non-government organisations and business. Lend Lease continues to work with leaders, including The Climate Group, to deliver next generation smart cities showcased at World Expo - Shanghai 2010."

Dan Hoornweg, Lead Urban Specialist, Cities and Climate change, World Bank: “Both financing and credible information are key to scaling up low carbon  solutions.  We appreciate the open dialogue that The Climate Group, Cisco and others are calling for and particularly welcome their encouragement to use a common GHG emission standard for cities, which is now being rolled out as part of the benchmarking for smart cities.”

Chris Vein, CIO, San Francisco: “The Shanghai Expo is a test-bed for urban and architectural design. In the same way this important coalition of cities and cleantech partners must create a new vision of the future and act together as laboratories for innovative low carbon development.”

Hon Mike Rann MP, Premier of South Australia: “Through engagement with leading businesses, the Government of South Australia and The Climate Group are identifying exciting collaborative opportunities to demonstrate the Smart City vision in Australia.  By sharing our efforts globally through the Smart 2020 platform we can accelerate emissions reductions with solutions that work.”

At the Dutch Government sponsored congress Front runners and Go-getters a new initiative is being presented: Double U Smartwork. This network of Smart Work Centers (SWC) is part of a collaboration between Cisco and the City of Amsterdam under the Connected Urban Development program (CUD), which serves to address modern urban challenges including mobility, climate, energy and sustainable ways of working. The Double U Smartwork aims to be a one stop shop for location providers, individual users, independent professionals and corporate users, where all Double U SWCS can be booked directly by a central booking tool.

Cisco, ABN AMRO, Rabobank and Touchdown Center are the founding parties. Double U is supported by Amsterdam Topstad and the City of Amsterdam which, as an employer, will be a launching customer for  Double U Smartwork.  A smart work center is a physical facility where high quality workplace solutions are offered to professional workers in a neutral, centrally located and easily accessible environment. To minimize traffic, a Smart Work Center is located in the vicinity of roads, traffic junctions, stations and residential areas. Currently there are several providers of SWC-like facilities in the Netherlands. The Double U Smartwork Foundation serves as a coordinating platform for SWC providers and aims to develop a national network.

Double U Highlights:
• Nationwide network of Smart Work Centers
The starting point for the creation of Double U Smartwork is to achieve national coverage of locations with an initial focus in the Randstad region, and the second stage in other parts of The Netherlands. Any user, regardless of where they live or reside, should have access to a good workplace within biking distance. Until recently, existing smart work centers were too fragmented and locally focused, therefore, employers operating on national level were not interested in offering their employees an alternative working spot. Double U links a network of over fifty open and smart work centers, with the plan to extend to one hundred national centers.
• Facilities
Smart Work Centers are well-equipped and go beyond providing a workplace. The services and facilities are not only meant to facilitate work itself, but also to provide work related services as  daycare and catering facilities as well as public TelePresence, Cisco’s immersive meeting technology. The first flagship SWC location, ‘Amsterdam Bright City’ in the Amsterdam South, will be the first to be equipped with TelePresence with several centers to follow across the country. In a later stage, the Dutch TelePresence sites will be linked to the international network of Tata, so SWC-users can collaborate worldwide.
• Central Booking Tool
Anyone can use the facilities offered by one simple online booking system. Through the portal, www.w-smartwork.nl,  users can quickly find the nearest location with the right facilities, whether they are on the road or at their workplace. The available providers are automatically displayed, or, in case in the requested location a facility isn't yet present, the nearest centers.
• iPhone app Worksnug
The new augmented reality app for the iPhone, Worksnug contributes to the user friendliness and the innovative nature of the SWC sites. By using global positioning in combination with the iPhone camera, Worksnug shows the best workplaces in the area around the camera image. The Double U smart work centers in Randstad will be included later this year.

Supporting Quotes:

Coks Stoffer, General Manager Cisco Netherlands: "As one of the initiators of the Connected Urban Development (CUD) program, we strive after  an environment friendly, smart working country without traffic  jams. By making work, space and time independently we do not only improve mobility but also productivity, work-life balance and climate. By working place and time independent, workers not only improve their mobility, but also their productivity, work-life balance and the environment in general. The experiences that we gained last year with the pilot in Almere, now sets the example for the new network of Double U. By deploying our IT solutions for the new way of working within the smart work centers, we bring work to the worker in a professional and approachable manner."

External Quotes:
Annemarie van Doorn, chairman of the Double U Foundation: "Double U aims to provide everyone a high quality and flexible work facility within cycling distance in order to achieve a smarter, more sustainable and distributed Netherlands. We bring work to the worker and not the other way around."
Mark de Kruijk, program director Amsterdam Topstad, City of Amsterdam: "This is going to be the new way of working. I am convinced that SWC contribute to a cleaner environment and an accessible city. It also contributes to a new attitude within the community: executives will start managing  more and more on output. And eventually I even anticipate  financial savings, because we need less office space in the city. "

Additional information 

This network of Smart Work Centers (SWC) is part of a collaboration between Cisco and the City of Amsterdam under the Connected Urban Development program (CUD), which serves to address modern urban challenges including mobility, climate, energy and sustainable ways of working.
• The Double U Foundation is one of a number of landmark projects that have resulted from Cisco's participation in the Clinton Global Initiative and its  pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Launched in 2006, CUD is a public-private partnership aimed at addressing the unique environmental problems facing urban areas and at developing ICT solutions for cities around the world.
• Cisco has collaborated on the Double U Foundation with industry like ABN AMRO, Rabobank and Touchdown Center, the Dutch government and academic leaders, such as the city of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM) and Amsterdam Smart City (ASC).
• Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities initiative helps transform physical communities to connected communities and achieve economic, social and environmental sustainability. Cisco works with customers, from idea to execution, leveraging vertical solutions built on the network as an open integrated platform, a broad ecosystem of partners and innovative business models to change how communities are designed, built, managed and renewed.

Availability:
• The Double U booking tool is scheduled to be available for public use by citizens of Amsterdam and the randstad region of the Netherlands on March 23. Within a few months 50 SWC will be linked to the booking tool.
• The WorkSnug application for Amsterdam and the Randstad region of the Netherlands will be announced on 23 March. The first weeks they will test the application for Dutch data, but end of April it is expected to go life.

Links/URLs
• Double  U portal, www.w-smartwork.nl
• Congress Front runners and Go-getters: http://tfmm.nl/index-loc1-28-soc1-28-art-28-naam-Aanmelden+Congres+23-03-2010.html
• Connected Urban Development program: http://www.connectedurbandevelopment.org
• Cisco Smart+ Connected Communities:  http://www.cisco.com/go/smartconnectedcommunities
• Cisco Telepresence http://www.cisco.com/web/NL/producten/telepresence.html
• Smart Work Center pilot launch, September 2008: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_092308b.html

Supporting Resources:
• Smart Work Center fact sheet:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/cud/SWC_Fact_Sheet_051209_FINAL.pdf
• Connected and Sustainable Work whitepaper:
http://www.connectedurbandevelopment.org/whitepapers/cisco#connected-and-sustainable-work-whitepaper-presentation

Cisco today announced the launch in Madrid of the first pilot project carried out in Spain within the Connected Urban Development program (CUD), in which companies and cities partner to contribute to the development of sustainable, efficient and innovative cities through the use of connectivity and new technologies.

Promoted by the Municipal Company for Housing and Lands of Madrid; Cisco, and technology partner Telvent, has deployed network infrastructure, connectivity and control systems in a pilot, apartment building in the city: Calle de Las Margaritas, 52. The development is intended as temporary housing on a rental basis to young people in Madrid.

The "Energy Efficiency Manager" installed in homes, can, at any time and in real time, manage energy consumption, controlling emissions of carbon dioxide and make decisions about the way in which residents make use of energy both at the individual apartment level and throughout the building. In the future this is intended to extend across the urban community.

http://www.telvent.es/

Cisco and the city of Amsterdam today announced the rollout of Urban EcoMap, an Internet-based tool that enables cities around the world to provide smarter climate change information for their citizens. A city can use Urban EcoMap to create awareness among its residents of the impact of carbon emissions on their urban environment. It provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by district, and delivers tips on ways to reduce a resident’s carbon footprint.

The Application is an extension of the Urban EcoMap launched in May 2009 in the city of San Francisco. The Amsterdam version of the Urban EcoMap will be progressively expanded over the next six months with real-time information that is linked to data from other agencies.

Urban EcoMap in Amsterdam will empower citizens to move from collective intelligence to collective action by providing emissions information on a neighborhood level, organized by local and comparable common boundaries like ZIP codes and districts.

Citizens will be able to view their neighborhood data through visual displays in the areas of transportation, energy and waste. This information empowers neighborhoods to identify and take specific actions to fight climate change using approaches such as alternative-fuel vehicle ownership, recycling, and reducing household energy use.

Citizens will then be able to take make decisions to help decrease the carbon footprint of their geographic regions, their particular district, and their city. They will be also able to share their climate actions with others via social networking. Comparisons are available between Amsterdam’s neighborhoods, and also enabled between the neighborhoods in Amsterdam and San Francisco.

 Urban EcoMap provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by district. As part of the Cisco® Connected Urban Development (CUD) program, the Urban EcoMap pilot is a cooperative initiative between the city of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM) and Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), the company's strategic global consulting arm. 

Additional Information:

•  Urban EcoMap is part of the global Urban Services Platform approach toward which visionary cities and the information and communications technology (ICT) industry are moving. Urban EcoMap provides real-time environmental intelligence to enable citizens, communities, cities, countries and businesses alike to make smart ecological decisions and to develop policies that improve the sustainability of cities. Through this comprehensive view of eco-data, we can now take a global "pulse" of the eco-health of our planet.
•  Cisco has collaborated on the Urban EcoMap program with industry, government and academic leaders, such as Arup, CH2MHill, NASA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the city and county of San Francisco, and most recently the city of Amsterdam and Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM).

The Urban EcoMap pilot is one of a number of landmark projects that have resulted from Cisco's participation in the Clinton Global Initiative and its pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Launched in 2006, CUD is a public-private partnership aimed at addressing the unique environmental problems facing urban areas and at developing ICT solutions for cities around the world.

Supporting Quotes:

• Job Cohen, mayor, city of Amsterdam
  "Sustainability is a hot topic in Amsterdam. The city stimulates developments in this field for both business and consumer purposes. The Urban EcoMap is an easy way to raise awareness among the inhabitants of their urban area. It will increase the engagement of our citizens and show what one can do to improve the ambience in one’s own neighborhood."

•  Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer and executive vice president, Cisco Services “Innovative cities like Amsterdam are addressing the issues and opportunities of this new world by thinking about technology as an enabler for economic development, environmental sustainability and an improved quality of life for citizens.  We see the network as particularly key to addressing one of the 21st century's most significant issues - environmental sustainability. Cisco is honored to collaborate with Mayor Cohen and the city of Amsterdam on Urban EcoMap, empowering citizens with the tools to make responsible environmental choices.”

New Connected Urban Development Alliance with The Climate Group to Foster Further Collaboration and Innovation.

Building on the success of the Connected Urban Development (CUD) initiative, Cisco today announced that it will extend its reach to additional cities and business partners around the world to explore how information and communications technology (ICT) can help address urban climate change and energy challenges. Cisco and the CUD partner cities have also engaged The Climate Group to launch the CUD Alliance, which aims to create a sustainable program to deliver integrated, ICT-enabled urban climate-change solutions in areas such as connected buildings, transportation, and energy management. The announcement was made in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting.

Facts/Highlights:

The Climate Group and Cisco have established the CUD Alliance to extend the reach of the CUD community to additional public- and private-sector partners from around the world.

• The CUD Alliance will build on the success of CUD, The Climate Group's city focus and the recommendations of the SMART2020 report, to create a forum for the development of globally relevant demonstration programs. The programs will focus on delivering low-carbon solutions through systems integration, policy and financing.
• The CUD Alliance will concentrate on three main areas: developing new partnerships to implement pilot projects at the city level; creating a platform to encourage common ICT standards for low-carbon urban solutions; and scaling existing projects and resources across a growing number of world cities to reduce carbon emissions.

Cisco will expand its work with cities around the world through its CUD program.

• Cisco has contributed $15 million to CUD over the past three years as part of its commitment to the CGI. Cisco will extend the program by continuing the development of pilot ICT projects that can be replicated and scaled. 
• Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) has created pilot projects with seven CUD cities: Amsterdam, the Netherlands; San Francisco, California; Seoul, South Korea; Birmingham, England; Hamburg, Germany; Lisbon, Portugal; and Madrid, Spain.
• Cisco will maintain its relationships with these cities and expand its engagement to other cities, particularly those in developing nations and the Eastern Hemisphere.
• These projects may serve as incubators for the energy and environmental aspects of Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities initiative, which addresses the growing need for sustainable energy by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future.

The CUD program has enabled seven unique, innovative pilots over the last three years.

• Smart Transportation Pricing (STP): Currently being run as a technical pilot in Seoul, STP encompasses a set of technology-based pricing reforms to encourage more efficient travel behavior and demand management solutions.
• Urban EcoMap: A pilot codeveloped with the City and County of San Francisco, Urban EcoMap provides cities with relevant data regarding primary greenhouse gas contributors—transportation, waste, and energy—to help city residents take action to reduce their emissions. Forthcoming development of the Amsterdam Urban EcoMap will scale the application globally.
• Personal Travel Assistant (PTA): PTA is a Web-based service that allows residents in Seoul and Amsterdam to make on-the-go travel decisions based on time, cost, and carbon impact. It offers "virtual assistant" features that provide transit guidance based on user preferences via any Web-enabled device, from any location.
• Smart UrbanEnergy for Schools: A partnership involving Cisco, the city of Lisbon, and the Portuguese Ministry of Education, this project aims to showcase how technology can improve global energy efficiency in both the built environment and energy networks. Energy savings of 33.4 percent were achieved during the first few months of the pilot.
• UrbanEnergy Management: This pilot with the city of Madrid explores how energy is generated, managed, and consumed. A 33-apartment building is being outfitted with bioclimatic design innovations that can deliver estimated energy savings of 75 to 85 percent.
• Smart Work Centers (SWCs): Currently being pilot-tested in Almere and Amsterdam, SWCs comprise a regional network of neighborhood professional work and community centers supporting travel virtualization and enabling mobile working practices. Integrating Cisco TelePresence^TM with virtual office solutions, SWCs offer a professional work environment near residential areas to lower energy use and carbon emissions. Thus far, users have saved an average of 66 minutes of commute time per day.
• The Connected Bus: In the City and County of San Francisco, The Connected Bus pilot is a landmark public transportation innovation aimed at enabling people, traffic, and public transit vehicles to flow more efficiently.

Supporting Quotes:

 

• John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco

   

  "With the urbanization of cities around the world, and urban areas contributing at least 80 percent of global carbon emission, cities present a tremendous opportunity to address climate change and environmental issues. The Connected Urban Development global community has successfully collaborated to demonstrate how ICT solutions can manage environmental challenges. Cisco is committed to furthering this progress and encourages both public- and private-sector partners to join us in this effort."

   

• Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group

   

  "Deploying smart, low-carbon technologies within world cities is central to unlocking energy efficiency at scale and transforming to a cleaner, greener, and more prosperous society and economy.  The new CUD Alliance will align a global armory of innovators, policymakers, financiers and businesses necessary to pilot and scale carbon-resilient systems, policies and practices for millions of citizens."

Supporting Resources:

• To view the webcast of Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers speaking about the success of CUD at the Clinton Global Initiative: http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/
• For more information on The Climate Group: www.theclimategroup.org
• For more information on CUD and its pilot programs: www.connectedurbandevelopment.org
• Cisco Ecolibrium blog: http://blogs.cisco.com/green
• SMART 2020: Enabling the Low-Carbon Economy in the Information Age, The Climate Group and GeSI, 2008: http://www.smart2020.org
• The Climate Group news update:http://www.theclimategroup.org/news_and_events/cisco_tcg_new_cud_alliance/

In advance of the launch of the Urban EcoMap, the application was previewed during the Mayor of San Francisco's Earth Day event.

San Francisco is the first city worldwide to introduce the Urban EcoMap. The web-based tool will will be made available to the general public at the Connected Urban Development conference in Seoul, 21st May 2009. The visual demo can be viewed on this website, and at the application website: www.urbanecomap.org.

Urban EcoMap gives every person the ability to see the collective results of individual climate change actions, while also motivating people to make responsible environmental choices and creating competition among neighborhoods to reduce their carbon footprint. Urban EcoMap provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by ZIP codes.

Quotes:

"Urban EcoMap in San Francisco provides residents, businesses and our city as a whole with much-needed tools to reduce our carbon footprint. With our city's effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2012, we are pleased - and think it's apropos - that Cisco selected San Francisco as the first city in the world to launch Urban EcoMap." - Gavin Newsom, Mayor, City and County of San Francisco

"Because cities produce 80 percent of GHG emissions worldwide, they present the largest opportunity for innovation and social behavior changes. Citizens want to see the collective results of their individual climate-change actions." - Simon Willis, vice president, global public sector, Cisco IBSG

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