Paper: Big data analytics for mitigating carbon emissions in smart cities

This paper “Big data analytics for mitigating carbon emissions in smart cities: opportunities and challenges”, written by Sarah Giest, tries to identify opportunities and challenges around big data use in the context of smart cities, and more specifically, for mitigating carbon emissions. The paper has an open access license.

Abstract

The paper addresses the growing scepticism around big data use in the context of smart cities. Big data is said to transform city governments into being more efficient, effective and evidence-based. However, critics point towards the limited capacity of government to overcome the siloed structure of data storage and manage the diverse stakeholders involved in setting up a data ecosystem. On the basis of this, the paper investigates the challenges city governments face when dealing with big data in the context of carbon emission reduction. Through the lens of the evidence-based policy and policy capacity literature, the cities of Copenhagen (Denmark), London (UK), Malmö (Sweden), Oxford (UK) and Vienna (Austria) are analysed. The cases reveal that the institutional complexity underlying big data integration limits local government capacity to set up data management structures that would allow further utilization of big data and that current solutions focus on local pilot sites and outsourcing of data analytics.

Reference

Giest, S. (2017). Big data analytics for mitigating carbon emissions in smart cities: opportunities and challenges. European Planning Studies, 25(6), pp.941-957.

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