AI4Cities brings together the leading European cities in the intersection of ‘Smart Cities’ and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction, in order to speed up and steer the creation of new breakthrough solutions in how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support cities’ strategic plans to become Carbon Neutral. Right now is the time to direct AI research/innovation towards the societal needs -- to assign detailed, pragmatic, solvable ‘missions’ from the cities’ climate action plans to AI developers. Through these missions, this project will create breakthrough, scalable, European solutions for these specific needs, and thus lead to immediate, concrete and measurable emissions savings, but more importantly, give examples on how to create impact and better future, for the whole of the AI community as well as all the European cities and citizens. On one hand, the opportunity window for European AI leadership is closing fast in the competition between solutions coming from the US and China - what kind of AI solutions govern us in the future is of great policy interest for Europe. On the other hand, urban emission reduction ambitions in most of the cities are set up so high that many of them are not realistically achievable without exploiting best-in-class ICT technologies. While cities are different, the largest opportunities for emission reduction in European cities are very similar. The highest common reduction targets in most cities’ climate action plans are in transport and in buildings’ energy use. As an example, in Helsinki, the production of Electricity and Heating accounts for 71% of GHG emissions; urban transportation and traffic account for 24%. Combined, these two sectors total 95% of Helsinki’s total carbon footprint. The purpose of this PCP is to support Cities’ transition to carbon neutrality, by applying the use of AI and related enabling digital technologies to tackle the challenge of reducing the Cities GHG emissions.

Internet of Everything is recognised to be one of the dominant ways transforming the way we manage and live in our urban environments in the future. The extension of the Internet to the physical spaces and objects is a massive opportunity for new services and business for example in the areas of logistics, transport, environment, security and wellbeing. Internet of everything is directly linked to the smart city development, but it has proceeded slower than expected. The key showstoppers are the lack of common standards, fragmented marketplace, and lack of ways to systematically test and introduce new solutions in the cities. The common challenge of the SELECT for Cities PCP is the design, research and development of “cities as linked and large-scale Internet of Everything labs”. The challenge lies in developing an open, standardized, data-driven, service-oriented and user-centric platform that enables large-scale co-creation, testing and validation of urban IoE applications and services. This approach fosters the longer-term goal of evidence-based innovation in cities. The envisaged platform has several requirements, components & features that are currently not available in existing solutions. The platform must allow collaboration between departments and cities, and (automated) testing of IoE services. The design should be based on an open and modular approach, and support cloud-based, data-driven, service-oriented, user-centric, and co-created large-scale testing. The joint effort of the partners procuring this pre-commercial track lies in guarding the integration capabilities of the platform with solutions that exist in the respective cities today. Particular attention will thus need to be paid to technologies and tools that allow smooth communication and integration between these existing solutions. The end goal of SELECT for Cities is taking the idea of the city as a large Internet of Everything Lab and putting it into practice.

Farmers and small operators are often in a weak position in the value chain. They lack bargaining power, face barriers to accessing markets, and struggle to achieve a fair income. At the same time, due to growing public awareness of the environmental crisis, and the rise of diet-related ill-health, many consumers want to conveniently access high quality, healthy and sustainable foods. In response, many innovative consumer-driven opportunities for farmers to access markets are now available. The aim of this project is to facilitate collaboration between farmers, consumers, local governments and other actors to scale up short agri-food chains which rebalance farmers’ position, create win-wins for producers and consumers and drive innovation in territorial food systems. It does this in five key ways. First, it develops a ‘living library’ of 32 emblematic good practice examples from 12 countries which demonstrate how farmers can access consumer-driven opportunities to improve their incomes and rebalance their position in food chains. Second, it delivers a knowledge-based suite of activities to support farmers and small operators to access information on consumer demand and improve their capacity to connect with consumers. Third, it provides new insights and guidance on the costs and margins for each link in the supply chain, demonstrating opportunities for improved incomes for farmers and small operators and reduced costs for intermediaries. Fourth, it designs a ‘farm-to-fork procurement toolkit’ for public authorities in order to improve sharing of experience and help them design appropriate tenders for healthy and fresh food supplied by small-scale producers and also to support farmers to know how to access these opportunities. Fifth, it maximises the impact of all the project’s activities through effective communication and dissemination including policy engagement in order to create a more enabling environment for collaborative agri-food chains.

The BuyZET project will develop innovative procurement plans to help the participating cities achieve their goals of zero emission urban delivery of goods and services. The core cities in the project - Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen - will first identify which goods and service procurement areas have the highest "transportation footprint" - i.e. the number of motorised vehicle trips to transport goods and people generated in delivering the goods or services, and the related emissions. Based on this each city will select two procurement areas to focus on for the project. For each priority area, the cities will then: a) Instigate in-depth market consultation activities with all relevant supply chain actors to identify potential procurement pathways to achieving zero emission delivery. b) Identify and engage with other significant public and private buyers in the priority area with the aim of establishing a buyers group, launching joint or collaborative procurement actions Based on these activities, each city will prepare procurement plans, identifying specific upcoming tenders where the innovative solutions identified will be applied. The core group of cities will be joined by a group of Observer Cities, who will closely engage with project activities and be encouraged to also carry out the defined activities within or following the project period.

The ever increasing demand for implementation of sustainable and innovative transportation solution in order to reach the cities service goals, dictates the need for more advance methods of procurement to address key parameters such as innovation, scalability, interoperability etc. Therefore, there is a strong need to establish a domain for understanding the public buyers’ needs and the market perspectives in this matter. SPICE will give an invaluable chance to public authorities to share their experiences of procurement of innovative sustainable transportation solutions and to learn from each other. Over a 24 month timeframe, this project will enable public procurers to form a stakeholder group. This project will gather the best practices in procurement of innovative sustainable transport and mobility solutions in three hierarchical levels; national, regional and city levels by engaging with leading European cities and regions, industry and academic institutions to facilitate sharing of their best practices and demonstration of using public procurements for innovative solutions using various instruments: PCP, public-private-innovation partnerships, market consultation, award criteria, etc. It will carry out in-depth analyses on current practices, to look into various possibilities to enable fast adoption of new technologies,and to define strategies of procurement approaches and award criteria stimulating innovation, thus forming a set of recommendations. This will assist public authorities to use this collection of best practices in a more constructive and simple manner and implement the recommendations through capacity building and knowledge transfer activities. Finally, using the project as platform, SPICE will form a number of buyers groups to work on strategies on how to plan joint, cross-border, procurement actions for their sustainable transportation projects,and–if possible– to commence planning of such actions during the timeframe of the SPICE project.