The “Talk series – Porto Towards Carbon Neutrality 2030” is an initiative organized by the Porto City Council, which includes 10 sessions of clarification and debate related to the themes of sustainability, decarbonization, and climate transition in the context of cities’ carbon neutrality. The eighth session took place last Thursday, July 6th, at the Porto Innovation Hub, with the theme “The Importance of Data”.
João Bastos, Director of Systems Architecture and Data Analysis at Porto Digital, moderated the event, which featured Miguel Almeida, a data science specialist; Ana Leite, Director of the Municipal Data Protection Department of the Municipality of Porto; and Ana Lima, Technical Director and Coordinator of the EPMQ Department (IT Engineering – Process, Data, Maturity, and Quality) of the CCG/ZGDV Institute and Visiting Professor at the University of Minho.
Each speaker had the right to an intervention, followed by a space for debate and clarification with the audience present.
At the opening of the session, João Bastos began by extolling the importance of data in decision-making, especially in the context of a city: “We are all aware of the importance of data in making decisions. It is important to understand how we can extract value from data, systematically, and with quality. And, in the context of a city, to understand how it can move towards carbon neutrality with the data that the city itself can manage”.
“For this, it is necessary: first, to democratize access to data and make them part of our day-to-day life; second, to look at them in the context of the city; and third, to trust the data and understand how they can contribute to the goal of carbon neutrality in Porto,” he added.
How Data Can Respond to the Climate Pact
The first intervention of the event was given by Ana Lima, Technical Director and Coordinator of the EPMQ Department (IT Engineering – Process, Data, Maturity, and Quality) of the CCG/ZGDV Institute and Visiting Professor at the University of Minho, who highlighted some of the advantages that data collection can bring to cities becoming sustainable.
Monitoring support for decision-making, analyzing risks and vulnerabilities, supporting research and innovation, and greater engagement with the citizen were some of the added values pointed out by the professor, who added: “Data can help in defining targets and commitments, which the government should stick to. These data also allow cities and even countries to reduce impacts as a result of the predictions they bring”.
After presenting the advantages, Ana Lima also brought to the discussion some of the challenges associated with data, such as cybersecurity, interoperability, and real-time data collection and transmission. “Therefore, it is important to ensure the ethical use of data to build citizen trust and avoid legal problems of use, to ensure that data have a clear language for systems to communicate with each other, and also to have high-speed communication networks that ensure real-time data transmission, which is still a problem”.
In this regard, she presented the project “Catalyst for smart cities”, which involves four pilots, in four cities, namely Porto, Aveiro, Guimarães, and Vila Nova de Famalicão. “The goal was to ensure the highest level of standardization and interoperability of urban platforms, with a greater capacity for prediction and analysis of data in different areas of action – environment, communications, mobility, telecommunications,” she said.
Ana Lima also explained that this project made it possible to evaluate, in real time, the assessment of cities’ sustainability dynamically: “This was only possible because a federated data architecture was created, that is, each of these municipalities has its own data repository and each one of them could provide the data in a standardized way so that each of the other municipalities could access them with the aim of generating knowledge from this sharing. All of this resulted in demonstration dashboards to see the population density in Famalicão, at a certain time, but also, with the environmental data collected, it was possible to know the CO2 concentration in the city and make changes”.
“Based on these results, we were able to understand that, within the framework of sustainable cities, data-based decision-making is valuable, both in terms of mobility, energy use, air quality, people flow, efficiency of public services, water consumption forecasts, resilience and adaptation to climate change, route planning, use of sustainable transport, and identification of demographic trends,” she said.
Visualizing a city with data
In turn, Miguel Almeida, a data science specialist, presented a project he developed with the aim of visualizing a city through a dashboard. The idea was that, upon entering the platform created by the specialist, all ordinary citizens could add information, such as transport availability, cultural spots, people flow, among others.
“The idea of this project is to disseminate data that is useful for making cities more sustainable, such as understanding whether, in a certain area, people are likely to walk or take the car, whether they are well served by transport or not, whether there is noise or pollution, which also indicate more pleasure or not in walking, issues of safety, gentle mobility, among other things. And also the tourism pressure, namely local accommodation because, in my opinion, the mobility problem is not dissociated from the housing problem,” he explained.
However, Miguel Almeida warned of the fact that it is very complex for citizens to access all the data they would need to be able to enter information on the site: “I will give the example of Lisbon. As a citizen, if I wanted to insert this data on this site, I would need at least three data sources – Lisbon’s open data portal, Transporlis, and EMEL’s portal. The problem is that few of the sources are in real time and collecting all this data would be very laborious. In addition, there are still data that are not on any of these three sites”.
But what can be changed to facilitate this data exchange? According to the specialist, it is necessary to ensure that data is not just the existence of an open data portal, and try to create conditions for the community to make good use of this data and place it on the sites and collaboration platforms that already exist.
“Citizens can use the information from this site to pressure their decision-makers and interact with them. With it, they can have support to say that a certain area of their parish is more disadvantaged,” he said.
How does Porto manage the data it produces?
Ana Leite, Director of the Municipal Data Protection Department of the Municipality of Porto, also highlighted the importance of citizens expressing their needs and demanding data, so that the importance of this data becomes increasingly noticeable: “You shouldn’t just accept that the mail has left the letters somewhere else, for example. There is data to circumvent this and people must understand that this tool now exists and demand it”.
The director also explained that the municipality of Porto focuses on organization to ensure that the entire region “speaks only one language” among its data. “After cataloging all the data, we can understand the set of data that makes sense to make available on the open data portal. And, in this sense, it is only possible to achieve carbon neutrality if we have these city data available,” she assured.
However, Ana Leite explained that for this to be possible, it is extremely necessary to change the cultural mindset: “The first major challenge is cultural. We need to assume that data is a new product and a new service of a municipality. We have to assume this, us who are producing it, as well as the citizens, who need them.”
“Ask us for the data so we can understand that we have to produce them. It helps us a lot to understand the city’s need for them. Therefore, asking for this product and demanding it is important, it is a greater good for us all to be able to speak this common language. Data is indeed a common heritage of humanity,” she concluded.
