Data, Cities, and Climate Change
Ninety percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years, and every two years it doubles in size. This statistic has been shared in various iterations by multiple professors throughout my time at Columbia Business School. When professed, it and is often greeted with the quiet nods of curiosity and eyes widening a bit in subtle shock. What does that equate to? About 64 zettabytes of total data in the world in 2020. What does that actually mean?
“A zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power bytes, also expressed as 1021 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) or 1 sextillion bytes. This is the equivalent of 660 billion Blu-ray discs, 33 million human brains, 330 million of the world’s largest hard drive.” — Kevin Bartley via Rivery.io (1)
But the question I keep coming back to, is so what? Why does this matter and how is this data utilized? Clearly it unlocks unimaginable abilities that even science fiction writers in the 1950s would have trouble fantasizing. From benevolent to malevolent, we can unlock such things as autonomous vehicles, global facial recognition, internet from satellites, tracking of anyone anywhere, and so on. With great data comes great opportunities and we are finding increasingly novel uses every day. One such issue improved data resources can address is climate change. With superior data ingestion capabilities from our physical world (LiDAR, radar, satellites, Infrared, computer vision, pressure sensors), superior storage and analytics capabilities, and expanded ambitions, we have unlocked some cool use cases.
One such example is our ever-growing cities. New York City partnered with a leading systematic visualization company, Cyclomedia, to create its “Street Tree Map”. This map is “the most detailed and accurate map of a city’s trees anywhere in the world”, including nearly 690,000 trees (3). This map was created using various sensors like LiDAR to translate environmental data into relevant information for human consumption. The point is we can use these advances to not only curate data on where trees are in our cities and how their condition is, but also use that to inform policy, environmental, and health outcomes.
“All this data is translated into overall city-wide savings, both on ecological and financial levels, calculated using formulae from the U.S. Forest Service. It is currently estimated that New York City’s trees are saving around 650,000kWh of energy a year. They are also saving more than 1.1 billion tons of CO2, and making financial savings of more than US$100million.” (3)
Previously we could guess what the savings are, and we know trees are good, but understanding them at this granular level improves our ability to pinpoint impact and expand impact in the future. Now let’s think bigger. If we can understand where foot traffic is or where parking spaces are often left vacant, we can better understand how to improve and optimize our cityscapes. We will know where to plant more trees to provide shade for commuters, provide better zoning for residential vs. commercial spaces, and where to provide expanded bike lanes or bus routes. This is just some high-level ideas from ground level data. This doesn’t even begin to factor in all the opportunities if you combine this data with the likes of public cameras, satellite imagery (like Pachama), car GPS, etc.
All of this is to say, we have so much data now and everyday it is rapidly increasing. Now we need to take the time to figure out novel ways to glean incites from the data to solve the worlds most pressing issues, which for me public enemy #1 is climate change.
