Cisco and San Francisco Partner on World’s First Urban EcoMap Pilot

Easy-to-Use Web Tool Spurs Residents and Businesses to Adopt Climate-Friendly Behavior in Cities

SAN FRANCISCO - As part of Earth Day, Cisco and the City and County of San Francisco today announced Urban EcoMap, an Internet-based tool that enables cities around the world to provide smarter climate change information for their citizens. For the first time, Urban EcoMap gives every person the ability to see the collective results of individual climate change actions, while also motivating people to make responsible environmental choices and creating competition among neighborhoods to reduce their carbon footprint. Urban EcoMap provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by ZIP codes.
Facts/Highlights:

* Urban EcoMap provides information on carbon emissions from transportation, energy and waste among neighborhoods, organized by ZIP codes. As part of the Connected Urban Development (CUD) program, the Urban EcoMap pilot is a collaborative effort between the City and County of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment and Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), the company’s strategic global consulting arm.

* Urban EcoMap provides local communities with information on their progress toward meeting greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals and gives them access to the most useful, locally available tools and resources for reducing their carbon footprint. Urban EcoMap in San Francisco amasses information on a neighborhood level, organized by ZIP codes, and encourages citizens to take action in the following two ways:

o Discover Your City’s Neighborhoods: Through this visual display, residents can see their GHG contributions in the areas of transportation, energy and waste. This knowledge will empower neighborhoods to identify and take specific actions to fight climate change, using approaches such as operating alternative-fuel vehicles, reducing household energy use and recycling.

o Take Climate Actions: Citizens can take action to help decrease the carbon footprint of their region, their particular ZIP code, and their city. By understanding the effort required to make various changes, the associated costs or financial benefits, and the environmental impacts, people can make better-informed decisions and promote change with others via social networking.

Additional Information:

* Endorsed by Cisco, Urban EcoMap is part of the Global Urban Services Platform approach toward which visionary cities and the information and communications technology (ICT) industry are moving. Urban EcoMap provides real-time environmental intelligence to enable citizens, communities, cities, countries and businesses alike to make smart ecological decisions and to develop policies that improve the sustainability of cities. It is the first global open-standards approach that allows people to contribute and to share eco-data in a public forum via any application or device, just as they would contribute the data published on the Internet. Through this comprehensive view of eco-data, we can now take a global “pulse” of the eco-health of our planet.

* Cisco is collaborating on the Urban EcoMap program with industry, government and academic leaders, such as Arup, CH2MHill, NASA, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In addition to the city of San Francisco, several CUD founding cities, such as Seoul and Amsterdam, have plans to pilot Urban EcoMap later this year.

* The Urban EcoMap pilot is one of a number of landmark projects that have resulted from Cisco’s participation in the Clinton Global Initiative and its pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Launched in 2006, CUD is a public-private partnership aimed at addressing the unique environmental problems facing urban areas and at developing ICT solutions for cities around the world.

Availability:

* Urban EcoMap is scheduled to be available for public use by citizens of the City and County of San Francisco on May 21, 2009.

Supporting quotes:

* Gavin Newsom, Mayor, City and County of San Francisco

“Urban EcoMap in San Francisco provides residents, businesses and our city as a whole with much-needed tools to reduce our carbon footprint. With our city’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2012, we are pleased - and think it’s apropos - that Cisco selected San Francisco as the first city in the world to launch Urban EcoMap.”

* Simon Willis, vice president, global public sector, Cisco IBSG

“Because cities produce 80 percent of GHG emissions worldwide, they present the largest opportunity for innovation and social behavior changes. Citizens want to see the collective results of their individual climate-change actions.”

Supporting Resources:

* Urban EcoMap visual preview
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/urbanecomap/demo_pop.html

* Urban EcoMap fact sheet:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/urbanecomap/factsheet.pdf

* For more information on Urban EcoMap
www.urbanecomap.org

* For more information on CUD
www.connectedurbandevelopment.org

* Cisco Ecolibrium blog
http://blogs.cisco.com/green

Videos:

* Video blog by Mayor Gavin Newsom
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/urbanecomap/newsom_pop.html

* Video blog by Nicola Villa, Connected Urban Development, global director, Cisco IBSG
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/media/green/villa_pop.html

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