The Challenge

The modern transport sector is one of the main contributors to environmental impacts due to its role in air pollution, greenhouse gases, and CO2 emissions. Even though the COVID-19 crisis has widely extended “Working From Home” adoption, a significant majority of people are still using their personal vehicles to commute between home and work, especially in suburban and rural areas. While local governments are starting to invest in Mobility as a Service strategies and infrastructures to stimulate the use of alternate means of transportation to reduce traffic congestion and the related environmental impact, it is still a big challenge to change the habits of the citizens.

On the other hand, as Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), urban green infrastructure (parks, gardens, urban forests, vertical gardens,…) directly contribute to air quality and carbon neutrality – through the removal of air-pollutants, carbon storage, and carbon sequestration – as well as indirectly – through reducing energy needs and pollutant emissions (e.g., through the increase of active Mobility and natural cooling). Furthermore, urban green also contributes to other policy
targets including health, well-being, climate change adaptation, biodiversity, urban regeneration, stormwater management, and social equality.

Although many modern cities have detailed GIS maps of their city and aim to integrate NBS in the city, they typically do not have the required information to identify and quantify their current urban green strengths and weaknesses across different domains.

The CO2-Mute project aims to support local governments in these specific challenges to engage the citizens in deploying policies for sustainable mobility and urban green infrastructure in the frame of their local environmental and digital transition strategies. CO2-Mute will first involve workers who commute between home and work by driving their individual vehicles.

The Solution

The CO2-Mute concept is to gamify alter-mobility usage by proposing collective and individual achievements to commuters and workers to evaluate the effective impact on costs, traffic, and the environment (air and noise pollution). The definitions of collective and individual alter-mobility challenges are directly linked to local government policies and the available local offers and possibilities for alternative and sustainable means of transport. The strategic objective is to contribute to pollution reduction and climate change mitigation whilst also supporting optimised decision-making for green space implementation in urban planning.

CO2-Mute has a high level of flexibility in its configuration and a strong capacity to deal with various types of data thanks to its “interoperable by design” approach and the use of a Digital Twin platform implementation based on NGSI-LD standard. The capacity to personalise and correlate the data depending on local situations is crucial to engage citizens on concrete actions leading to measurable impacts. The fair and controlled sharing of heterogeneous data plays a central role, and as transparent business models are needed, CO2-Mute relies on i4Trust architecture.

Business projections – scalability

Participating and contributing in i4Trust is a starting point for C02-Mute to achieve the goal of delivering digital technology, addressing major environmental challenges, and creating new fair and sustainable revenue streams for innovative SMEs in the emerging framework of data spaces. Starting with the city of Saint Quentin is also an important asset to gain visibility and adoption of continuity in all the cities as this city is already known as a success story and very well connected to regional policies and European initiatives, such as Living-in-EU.

Each individual SME has clear business goals in contributing to the project:

• Hostabee: Reinforcing CO2-Mute’s position and diversification strategy, with their significant and direct impact on the environment, to design and deliver smart solutions.
• SISTER: Making CO2-Mute’s high-value machine learning services more interoperable through better integration of FIWARE components. It is also allowing the development of a new business approach based on the concept of “algorithm as a service”.
• Montem: Extending the features of its brand new city probe to sensors as a “Powered by FIWARE” device to facilitate the integration in solutions, addressing the public markets and enhancing the capacity to scale the smart city sector.