Page 12 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities | Striving for sustainable development goals

and sustainable – encourages cities to adopt integrated policies
and plans to build more inclusive, resource-efficient cities able to
mitigate and adapt to climate change and improve their resilience
to disasters. The promotion of Smart Sustainable Cities will be key
to achieving these objectives, in addition serving the overarching
objective outlined by Goal 13, to “Take urgent action to combat
climate change and its impacts”.

The new ITU-T Study Group 20 is developing international
standards to enable the coordinated development of the Internet
of Things (IoT), including machine-to-machine communications
and ubiquitous sensor networks. The Study Group will develop
standards that leverage IoT to address urban-development
challenges, building on the 21 Technical Reports and Specifications
compiled by this compendium.

The Technical Reports and Specifications outline feasible means of
developing Smart Sustainable Cities. They provide guidance to city
leaders in establishing a framework for the management, control
and optimization of the Smart Sustainable City environment as a
laboratory for innovation and urban simulation. Such frameworks
help us to improve our understanding of existing urban challenges
as a basis for the development of effective responses to these
challenges using coordinated urban ICT systems.

This compendium also provides a detailed list of the key
performance indicators (KPIs) for Smart Sustainable Cities
developed by the Focus Group to assist city leaders in evaluating
their degree of success in achieving the objectives of smart-city
strategies. Dubai and Singapore were the first two cities to join
ITU’s two-year pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of the KPIs,
and ITU has been approached by a range of other cities interesting
in joining the project. The pilot project will contribute to ITU’s
international standardization of the indicators and the subsequent
development of a ‘Global Smart Sustainable Cities Index’ derived
from this set of indicators.

This compendium is part of ITU’s efforts to support city leaders
in their efforts to improve their understanding of the capabilities
of Smart Sustainable Cities and the urban-development challenges
motivating their development. ITU is committed to assisting cities
in defining and executing long-term strategies for the development
of Smart Sustainable Cities, and we are pleased to present this
compendium in service of this commitment.

2 ITU-T’s Technical Reports and Specifications