The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM) has launched the Innovate4Cities global climate action accelerator, which seeks to define and address research and innovation opportunities for cities and create partnerships with business, academic and government communities.
One of the first outcomes of Innovate4Cities is a new partnership between GCoM, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Google. According to a press release, the partnership will offer Google’s new tool, called Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), to thousands of cities worldwide, allowing local governments to immediately and freely access the data they need to develop city greenhouse gas emission inventories based on transportation and buildings emissions, weather forecast models and rooftop solar potential. EIE was initially launched in mid-September as a beta version with just five pilot cities.
“Data- driven solutions are key to unlocking the climate challenge, and many cities lack the resources to gather the data on their own,” said Rebecca Moore, director and founder of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine. “When it became clear to us that Google’s comprehensive global mapping data and computing technology could be used to derive critical new climate-relevant knowledge for cities, we committed enthusiastically to this effort.”
