Sustainable development of cities in APAC will be driven largely by ICT, the ITU Green Standards Week in Beijing held in September concluded.
City planners are expected to enable efficiency gains in areas such as energy distribution and consumption, transportation systems, water management and waste disposal.
A connected citizenry is also seen as a route to better access to education and healthcare as well as to more collaborative city governance.
Thus, participants are advocating a prominent catalytic role for ICTs in international and regional urban development strategies, a view supported at the Rio+20 Summit as well as at the recent United Nations Summit on Climate Change in New York also in September.
“ICTs must themselves become more environmentally efficient, but they also have a central role to play in decreasing the environmental impact of other industry sectors,” said Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. “This is now becoming well understood, but that took years of advocacy, including ITU’s participation in the UN climate change conferences, in order to gain this recognition.”
The Call to Action calls for stronger cooperation between the energy and ICT sectors and emphasizes the value of international technical standards in ensuring that smart-city solutions see the benefits of economies of scale and interoperability.