The goal is high. Very high: improving people’s lives by reducing traffic. This is what software aims for – free and open source – which creates maps to visualize the links between environmental sustainability and citizen well-being.
Developed by the Stanford Natural Capital Project of Stanford University, in the US, this new technology could help cities rationalize travel, giving planners and developers a tool to visualize where to make green investments (such as parks and gardens) to avoid flooding and reduce mobility pollution.
“This software helps design better cities for both people and nature,” he explained Anne Guerry, Chief Strategy Officer and Lead Scientist at the Natural Capital Project. And he added: “City green can have several benefits: the trees in your street can lower temperatures so that your apartment is cooler on hot summer days. At the same time, trees absorb carbon emissions from mobility and from other sources that cause climate change, creating a more pleasant place to be. “
The software, called Urban InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), is the first of its kind and allows for the combination of environmental data, such as temperature models, with demographic, social and economic data. Users can enter their city data sets into the software or access a variety of open global data sources, from NASA satellites to local weather stations.
To test Urban InVEST, the team applied the software in multiple cities around the world: Paris (France), Lausanne (Switzerland), Shenzhen and Guangzhou (China) and several cities in the United States, including San Francisco and Minneapolis. In Shenzhen, for example, researchers used Urban InVEST to calculate how parks and forests would reduce damage in the event of a particularly severe storm. They found that the city’s greenery would help avoid $ 25 billion in damage by absorbing rain and diverting floodwaters.
It must also be said that InVEST is a suite of models used to map and evaluate the goods and services of nature that support and satisfy human life. It helps to explore how changes in ecosystems can lead to changes in the streams of many different benefits to people. All this because, if managed correctly, ecosystems in fact produce a flow of services that are vital for humanity, including the production of goods (e.g. food), life support processes (e.g. water purification) and satisfactory conditions. (e.g. beauty, opportunities for recreation) and the conservation of options (e.g. genetic diversity for future uses).
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