New tool for climate action lets cities test policy scenarios

CURB, or Climate Action for Urban Sustainability, is a Big Data tool designed to help cities answer what-if questions when identifying and prioritising climate actions.

chennai
Street scene on Egmore, Chennai. The city was chosen as test site to roll out CURB, a tooI to test policies on city planning. Image: Ryan, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

City planners determined to tackle climate change have a new interactive planning tool on their side. Stephen Hammer blogs for the World Bank that the tool can “help cities identify and prioritise climate actions” that reduce fossil-fuel emissions.

It’s called CURB, or Climate Action for Urban Sustainability. It was launched this month during Climate Week, the article says. The Big Data tool is designed to help cities answer what-if questions, writes Hammer, manager of climate policy for the World Bank. It allows city leaders to test the impact of different policy scenarios, and access proxy information that can fill in the inevitable gaps in data.   

The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group debuted the tool in Johannesburg and Buenos Aires, and will make it available to all 86 member cities by 2020, Hammer says. The World Bank is piloting the tool in Chennai and Bangalore, and will introduce it to 100-plus cities throughout Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. The Compact of Mayors also plans to promote CURB among its member cities.

This story is published with permission from Citiscope, a nonprofit news outlet that covers innovations in cities around the world. More at Citiscope.org.

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