Of course, cities look different based on when they were built, along with the cultural and architectural differences they reflect. There’s no mistaking Rome for Tokyo, for instance.

And yet, all over the world, the people who govern these cities have the same challenge: how to better serve residents and visitors. Whether it’s improving quality of life, the future of work, accessibility, or sustainability, city leaders and planners are thinking deeply about what the future holds and how to best prepare.

I wrote earlier in the year that we cannot miss the current chance to rebuild our infrastructure for accessibility. The same imperative applies to the buildings where we live, work, learn, and play.

Above all, our buildings don’t exist in isolation. I use the term “built environment” as a catchall to describe the various structures that distinguish cities from the natural environment. Looking ahead, the biggest benefits will be realized when buildings operate as a seamless part of the larger system of infrastructure.

Better accessible experiences

For anyone working in or visiting a place, the behind-the-scenes operations should remain invisible. What matters is the experience: how easy and accessible it is getting in and out of a space or building, how comfortable it is to accomplish work, and how seamless it is to visit. Reducing barriers and enabling a positive experience is what people want, and technology gives us much better ways of doing that.

But how does that happen? Let’s take a fun example—going to a sporting event. What makes it work?

• An arena, like Madison Square Garden in New York, that’s connected to several major transit systems so people can use the mode of transportation that best fits their needs.
• Ticketing that is easy to scan and keeps people moving through lines quickly. This is better for fans and workers.
• A fully accessible space that helps everyone get to where they are going, easily and comfortably.
• Contactless payment to keep concessions lines fast and short.
• Strong connectivity that lets thousands of people use their devices.

Boosting operations with data

Heathrow airport is using data-driven insights to improve airport passenger flow, which helps deliver greater efficiency and cost savings for the airport and its carriers through more streamlined turnaround times for planes. This directly and positively impacts both the passengers and the staff working at the airport.

Daily operations—from security to air conditioning to lighting—come at a considerable cost. The fastest way to efficiency and cost reduction is by using data to make rapid, informed decisions. This is particularly important for older buildings that were not made for today’s technology and construction standards. As a result, the first rule for improving operations is that any changes or upgrades must apply to prioritized use cases. 

Creating a safer workplace

Our buildings also have a major impact on the way people work. For example, the physical workspace has an influence on employees’ ability to collaborate—it needs to accommodate employees’ needs throughout the day, and it needs to be intentional in facilitating movements in, out of, or around the space.

Government adoption of remote and hybrid work has varied widely since the start of COVID-19. But as governments invest in new buildings, it only makes sense to design them for safer working conditions—whether for hybrid or in-person workforces. It’s not only about productivity but also about creating a better employee experience. 

For example, Italy’s National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work launched a new badge system to solve building access issues. This resulted in a streamlined process for visitor access while ensuring that employees could easily move around the workplace. The new badge system made it easy to enable limited access to its physical spaces and data center only to authorized personnel.

Building sustainably  

Whether it’s a new building or the renovation of an old one, construction projects are a major opportunity to ensure focus on sustainability as a strategic priority. Energy efficiency across operations is a high priority in helping organizations achieve their sustainability goals while reducing costs of lighting and running heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The automation of these systems to respond when buildings, floors, or even individual rooms are occupied can result in significant efficiencies. 

In a great example of how this works, MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions helps customers build energy-efficient buildings and keep them operating at peak efficiency. MacDonald-Miller has gone all in with the Microsoft Cloud to design cutting-edge smart-building systems that save customers money.

But sustainability isn’t only about energy or carbon emissions. Technology can also help during construction to ensure building placement has a minimal environmental impact, enables more sustainable water use practices, and minimizes waste.

As we implement these solutions at scale, people will benefit from government and other publicly owned spaces and buildings—such as parks, arenas, or stadiums—to help them get the most out of their experience. Better operations help governments save money, and a focus on sustainability will ensure these spaces contribute to a healthier, cleaner future.

Transforming the built environment

By making bold investments in solutions that deliver on efficiency, safety, and sustainability goals, governments can make an outsized impact because of their vast real estate holdings. They also are major employers, and employees stand to realize significant benefits when improvements are made to government buildings. Our buildings were created to serve the public—and now we have the opportunity to make informed choices that will transform our built environment for the better.

Stay up to date on Microsoft’s global approach to government infrastructure by visiting the Microsoft for Critical Infrastructure website.

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We in the tech industry are partnering with public sector organizations on that journey, which is why Microsoft made a commitment to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030, all while harnessing the power of digital technology to help other organizations meet their sustainability targets. Our focus on this ‘twin transition’ of a greener world driven by green technologies has led to milestones such as the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability last October, which helps a variety of industries to better record, report, and reduce carbon emissions.

Microsoft as a trusted partner

The road ahead for environmental sustainability relies on strong partnerships across the public and private sectors, non-profits, start-ups, and researchers. We continue to see the amazing ways these partnerships and digital technology are making the public sector prepared and resilient in the face of tomorrow’s challenges.

Our work with the United States Army Corps of Engineers is one example of the power of cloud, data, and AI to improve climate modeling and build preparedness for the impact of extreme weather on coastal communities. By enhancing storm modeling with the cloud, we are helping the United States government protect the lives and property of the most vulnerable communities around the country.

The power of digital is also in the way it enables data-informed policymaking. As part of our AI for Earth initiative, we are working with non-profits and the governments of Thailand and Costa Rica to help them stop illegal fishing. Cloud and AI algorithms are enabling those governments to monitor ship movements and protect fishing stocks, mitigating one of the greatest threats to marine ecosystems.

Finally, we are supporting public sector organizations around the globe as they break down barriers to meet their environmental targets. The city of Gandía, Spain, for example, is using connected streetlights through the cloud that report energy consumption, which annually helps to lower energy consumption by 66 percent, improve citywide lighting, and cut over 2,700 tons of carbon emissions.

Microsoft’s road to net zero

These results are just a few of the many successes being driven worldwide by a shared commitment to sustainability. This month, we reported on our progress in 2021 and the work still to be done on the road to net zero. Over the past two fiscal years, Microsoft has allocated $571 million to accelerate our carbon, water, and waste goals.

The impact has been incredible and so far, we have:

• Removed 2.5 million tons of carbon.
• Signed power purchase agreements for roughly 5.8 gigawatts of renewable energy across 10 countries.
• Helped provide more than 95,000 people with access to safe water.
• Diverted over 15,200 metric tons of solid waste from landfills and incinerators.
• Helped protect over 17,000 acres of land.

We are just getting started, and there is so much more to accomplish toward our 2030 goals. We look forward to continuing that work alongside our public sector clients and partners, in honor of our shared vision for a healthy, sustainable, and safe world.

Listen to our recent on-demand webinar where you can learn how to create a better future by harnessing the power of new and emerging technologies.

Stay up to date on Microsoft’s global approach to government by visiting the Microsoft for Government website.

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At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This includes helping to create a safe and sustainable future. No single organization can do this alone. We must come together as a global community to address our most pressing sustainability challenges. That’s why we joined the WBCSD – to not only help leverage technology for positive economic and social change, but also to learn from others on how to best achieve sustainable growth.

As technology rapidly evolves, our global society will continue to push the limits of possibility. Significant development around the world will open new doors and create new challenges, and Microsoft is committed to taking a leading role in ensuring businesses and governments achieve their goals in a sustainable way. We know that more people will be living in cities – 70% of the global population by 2050. Working with the WBCSD, I look forward to driving sustainable solutions for the growing mobility and energy needs that will come with this shift.

By joining the WBCSD’s community of businesses around the world, which represent a combined revenue of $8.5 trillion and 19 million employees, it is our intent to help others make a tangible impact on global corporate sustainability. Microsoft sees technology as a powerful tool to meet several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which lie at the heart of the WBCSD’s mission. Using our advanced cloud-based technologies and our diverse partnerships, we will work with members of the WBCSD to explore new ways that people and organizations around the world can thrive in sustainable ways.

We are living in remarkable times, where a focus on the future of our planet and its people has never been more important. Microsoft is committed to helping its partners and customers achieve more sustainable growth through innovation, collaboration, and the life-changing promise of digital transformation, and I am ready to get to work with the WBCSD and its members.

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They’ll include partners who specialize in helping cities improve their sustainability with solutions that span energy, water, building energy management, transportation, resource efficiency, and ecosystem services.

Managing water and preventing flooding

For example, our CityNext partner ireckon! will be in our booth at Smart City Expo. It helped the City of Breda in the Netherlands to manage water and prevent flooding while reducing costs with a cloud solution.

With two rivers and high rainfall, the City of Breda needed a comprehensive water management system, so it undertook the “Smart Data Management” Waterakkers project running on Microsoft Azure with the help of ireckon!.

The City of Breda can now analyze and visualize massive data collected by sensors and pumps around the city and can even predict pump failure—all in real time. Citizens participate by sending water observations through social media. The city can add as many sensors as it wants, has reduced maintenance costs, and is better able to prevent flooding.

Watch this short video to see how it works.

Enabling a smart grid

Our CityNext partner Powel will also be with us at Smart City Expo. Powel is part of an exciting pilot project with Microsoft and Agder Energi in Norway—which we recently announced—that will help create a more efficient, flexible, and intelligent grid of the future.

The project will create a cutting-edge smart grid solution to enable integration of renewables onto the grid and help keep pace with growing energy consumption.

Powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud, PowerBI, and Azure IoT Hub, the project will empower operators to better predict demand and engage distributed resources like rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles and smart homes. By tapping these resources instead of traditional power plants, this type of smart grid solution has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gases and improve efficiency across electrical grids.

Watch this video from Agder Energi to see how it will work.

The pilot is a great example of a smart city digital transformation project coming together through collaboration of global and local contributors. It’s through these types of public-private partnerships that cities and utilities can advance energy management and improve sustainability for their communities.

Tackling your specific sustainability challenges

Today’s technologies can help communities of any size—small towns, cities, municipalities, or entire regions—adopt sustainable ways to meet the demands of urbanization. At Smart City Expo, you can learn how our partners can help your city with your specific resource challenges. You’ll find out how you can digitally transform management of your energy sources, water, waste, and more with help from ireckon!, Powel, and our other CityNext partners.

Meantime, check out our event page for up-to-date details on what Microsoft and our partners are doing at the Expo, to sign up for our pre-day event, and to request a one-on-one meeting with one of our subject matter experts.

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The report’s findings illustrate how digital technology can shape and transform a broad range of economic and social opportunities worldwide. At Microsoft, we are inspired by these findings, and as a company whose mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and a member of GeSI, we fully believe in the Digital Transformation possibilities to drive progress with the SDGs to create more equity and improve all citizens’ quality of life.

The GeSI report highlights the recurring themes of the need for innovation and collaboration. It reinforced an idea I’ve seen time and time again: if we want to create lasting change, we must all play our part – especially those within the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector.

Whilst the report was filled with valuable insight, a few ideas stood out as major takeaways for me:

• Improving people’s lives: 1.6 billion people could benefit from more accessible, affordable and better quality medical services through e-healthcare, while connected car solutions could save up to 720,000 lives annually and prevent up to 30 million traffic injuries (SDG#3);
• Boosting equitable growth: Digital solutions like the Internet of Things and robotics can help bring almost US$1 trillion in economic benefits to industries from smart manufacturing and smart logistics (SDG#9);
• Protecting the environment: Digital solutions could enable greenhouse gas emissions reduction and drive market transformation for renewables, cutting carbon emissions by around 20 percent in 2030 (SDG#13).

Consistent with the SDGs, Microsoft’s clear mission is to enable every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Digital solutions are vital to advancing these aims and those of the SDGs because they diffuse at unprecedented speed and reach while increasing access to goods and services in a more people-centric, affordable and sustainable way.

Our role as a global organization is to help the health industry move from one bounded by walls and institutions where almost all of the care takes place in a doctor’s office or clinic, to one where much more of the work, the expenditures, and the success and innovation happens outside those institutions to enable more of a healthcare and preventative care industry. We refer to this transformation as “healthcare without walls.”

• Shezlong, an Egypt-based, start-up company, that looks to offer online psychotherapy for millions of sufferers within the country and the Middle East is using Microsoft Azure, a fully scalable, secure and accessible cloud-based platform. Shezlong is trying to fill this service gap by offering online treatment from qualified psychotherapists. The online nature of this service helps overcome cultural barriers and social stigma typically associated with seeking and receiving treatment.
• Microsoft cloud technology is being used to deliver online healthcare services to regions of Botswana currently without adequate primary care or access to broadband. This allows local medical workers to send high-resolution patient images to specialized medical facilities in Gabaronne and around the world. The goal is more accurate diagnoses and better patient care.

We also believe every country and community needs to evolve and innovate to compete in the dynamic global economy. That means unleashing the innovative job creators of the future and building the skills of the workforce to fill those jobs. Microsoft works to empower both sides of the future economy — helping local entrepreneurs bring the next great idea to life and enabling the future workforce that will help those innovators make their ideas a reality.

• Microsoft helped launch TV white spaces in rural Kenya, bringing the Internet to rural areas via underutilized broadcast bandwidth and solar power. A recycled shipping container serves as an Internet café and is enabling enterprising citizens to earn a living online. The technology, which is also bringing the Internet to schools and to the Red Cross, is changing lives in Kenya.

We’re also working with governments and organizations globally to connect social and mobile data through cloud technologies to improve overall resource efficiency, reduce energy use and emissions, and better manage waste. Our work has empowered solutions designed to address issues ranging from establishing smart grids to improving water management.

• Working with Microsoft and CGI, the city of Helsinki Finland, expanded the company’s data warehouse solution to collect and analyze data from bus sensors to reduce fuel consumption, improve driver performance, and make bus rides smoother and safer.
• Carnegie Mellon University utilized Microsoft Azure, Cortana Intelligence, Power BI, and the PI System to reduce campus building maintenance and energy costs. With these capabilities, CMU personnel gain advanced analytics for improved operational insights and decisions, and CMU gains a way to cut energy use by 30 percent.
• Singapore’s national water agency, PUB, is using Azure and SharePoint to host mobile app MyWaters to educate citizens on water conservation and flood levels. Citizens can also provide real-time info on water levels in areas that may be unmonitored by CCTV cameras.

This report reflects on both the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead for our global community. For instance, every country has achievement gaps in more than half of the 17 SDGs and many fall short on all of them.

Taking advantage of digital solutions will give countries the ability to measure, track and advance the SDGs within trusted environments and enable true progress. We particularly appreciate our long-standing work with GeSI, as our combined desire to collaborate, communicate, and bring people together with innovative technology, unites us and can make a difference in closing those gaps. The report released today provides the ICT industry with an opportunity to define a clear path to a better future — a future of integrated solutions that tackle interrelated problems for helping the world’s nations solve critical social, economic and environmental challenges. We look forward to being part of this Digital Transformation.

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Cities generate around 80 percent of global economic output, and around 70 percent of global energy use and energy-related GHG emissions. How the world’s largest and fastest-growing cities develop will be critical to the future of sustainability and managing climate change. So, how can we reconcile the anticipated growth of urban areas and our dependency on natural resources, with the need to create more efficient, prosperous and economically competitive cities?

Faced with the mounting pressures of population growth and resource depletion, only cities that find ways to manage their resources more efficiently and bridge the disparate systems within a city to optimize performance and value creation will lead the way. Investing in information and data as a resource will allow cities to be able to service increasing populations more efficiently and with less waste. Leveraging data to better manage cities’ infrastructures will assist in providing more higher quality services while at the same time offering greater cost certainty.

We’ve written previously about our approach to smart cities called Microsoft CityNext, in which Microsoft and our worldwide partner network are working with cities to modernize and provide safer, healthier and more educated communities where citizens can thrive. As smart cities and sustainability become more interdependent, we realized the importance of harnessing our expertise and commitment to both of these issues, and bringing them closer together. In order to better address the challenges and opportunities that both cities and our partners face in the increasingly systemic areas of sustainability and cities, my sustainability team and I will be joining forces with our CityNext team to drive greater synergies and opportunities for enabling impact at scale. This new team will allow us to bring together the expertise across Microsoft and drive a more holistic approach to this challenge. What does this mean for the company’s sustainability efforts? The move brings together Microsoft’s corporate sustainability practice with its CityNext efforts and creates opportunities to better leverage our work in energy, carbon, water and IT-enablement. As environmental issues increasingly affect cities and governments, Microsoft has a great opportunity to increase the company’s impact through our continuous efforts to grow and improve in this area. In many ways, this move reflects changes that have been recognized by many of the largest cities around the world.

We hope the combination of our work with cities and sustainability will help us and our partners better explore the linkages between the two – to deliver creative solutions that help cities use technology to their optimal benefit.

We are excited to see where this new transition will lead us, and the future opportunities that will result to work with our partners and cities around the world to help accelerate the positive impact that IT can have on societal and cities’ challenges.

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