Technological change is a crucial aspect for achieving the green economy and fostering green growth, with open source software promoting collaboration in urban centres to solve climate change and resource scarcity challenges.
The green economy and cities
The green economy is one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. Simply, a green economy is low carbon, resource-efficient, and socially inclusive. In the green economy, green growth ensures that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies.
Cities are facilitating the transition to a green economy as they are not only home to the majority of the world’s population and drivers of the global economy, but they are also centres of knowledge and innovation, providing numerous opportunities for the public and private sectors to design strategies and technologies that improve urban transport and the built environment, whilst managing urban energy, water, and waste systems in ways that reduce resource usage, create green jobs, enhance social equity and quality of life, and restore the natural environment.
Green technologies and the green economy
At the city level, green technologies can help urban centres meet their green economy and green growth objectives by:
- Improving resource-use efficiency: Green technologies enhance the efficient use of energy, water, and other material inputs
- Ensuring ecosystem resilience: Green technologies help protect the natural environment, its ecosystems, and ecosystem flows
- Enhancing social equity: Green technologies promote the fairer distribution of resources across society
Open source software driving the green economy and green growth in cities
Open source software promotes collaboration to solve climate change and resource scarcity challenges. For example, open standards allow for the integrating and controlling of a variety of energy and industrial products, enhancing energy efficiency and reducing emissions. Without these standards, new code would have to be written each time a component needs to talk with another one. Also, open source software provides a foundation that anyone can build atop, providing a platform for SMEs, large companies and entrepreneurs to integrate their green technology products.
It means that when an organisation develops new smart services and solutions it must be able to securely communicate with other services and devices, to engage with global players. Only this way, organizations can benefit from knowing that their solutions can be connected with other applications or pieces of software — already developed and widely available — that they can replicate them for multiple customers with rather low adaptation costs and collaborate on software they can modify to address their changing needs.
The beacon of green technology innovation and collaborative approaches
Often, we have questions about specific green technologies or practices in open source software. However, the answers we seek tend to be buried deep in online forums or in difficult-to-read guides. More than ever before, developers and smart solution providers share the belief that increased collaboration across the open source ecosystem is set to advance open source technology and accelerate green business opportunities.
Sounds pretty straight forward, does it not? And it should be. Spreading the technology enhances user experience, boosts efficiencies and streamlined processes. Open source spur innovation through collaboration. If it had not been for it, many of the technologies that we - consciously or unconsciously - tend to downplay today, would never have been brought to life, or its existence would have been largely delayed due to patent issues.
The open source movement is the very reason why technology has evolved at such a fast pace for the past few years. After all, when developers, engineers, decision makers and technology end users can engage with one another on a global scale, the result is a set of dynamic open hardware technologies, faster applications and far more cost-effective services.
Communities are at the front of innovation – Enabling collaborative air quality measurement in Spain with open source software
A recent example that demonstrates the strong spirit of sharing and collaboration in the open source community is the RESPIRA FIWARE for collaborative air quality measurement. RESPIRA is an open source air monitoring device for urban applications, born out of a 2019 IoT (Internet of Things) challenge by the FIWARE Space iHub in Badajoz (Spain). Developed by local SME Panstamp, RESPIRA allows users to record and visualize in real-time some of the most important indicators of air quality within the city, such as NO2, PM2.5, PM10, as well as temperature and humidity levels.
As part of this platform, a compact and affordable measuring station was designed, making it possible for anyone to set up their own station and start sending data from home, with just a few steps. The platform does not rely solely on its own stations and data coming from users. The platform Context Broker also integrates measurements taken by the State Meteorology Agency (AEMET) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), for instance.
Badajoz now boasts a total of 56 stations, of which 28 have been created as part of the RESPIRA FIWARE. All this data, independently of their origin, can be viewed in RESPIRA’s visualization tool. In addition, the FIWARE Foundation is an active contributor to open standardization activities, enabling the further development of smart green solutions in a cost-effective and tailored manner.
Conclusion
Open source software enables the private and public sectors to design new innovative green technologies that facilitate the development of a low-carbon, resource-efficient, socially equitable green economy, whilst avoiding vendor lock-in scenarios. It goes beyond how you code and diffuse software: It's about organisation structure, management style decision-making and much more.
