Keywords: sustainable community, environmental goals, ecological footprint
One of the Smart Future Citizen competencies is sustainable community and development, which encompasses the skills, knowledge, and abilities that enable active contributions to environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable communities. Climate change, the widely discussed topic that occupies the thoughts of many, is impacted by cities. The United Nations estimates that cities account for over 70% of global CO2 emissions. Ülemiste City, the largest privately-owned business area in the Baltic states, located in Tallinn, Estonia, is a talent hub and an intellectual setting that has set the environment as its top priority. Ülemiste City is a Smart City that goes beyond digital technologies for better resource use and less emissions. It means more innovative urban transport networks, upgraded waste disposal facilities, and more efficient ways to light and heat buildings.
Ülemiste Smart City has set itself environmental goals. These include increasing the number of electric vehicles, charging stations and electronic bicycle racks alongside a concerted effort to improve green areas, outdoor working and recreation areas, and waste sorting and collection. It will lead to increased employee satisfaction with the working environment.
On August 31, 2023, a special event was held, launching the Green City service that allows big businesses to monitor and report their consumption and recommendations to reduce it. From August 21 to September 22, a cycling campaign aimed to promote commuting to work by bicycle instead of using cars. The key takeaway was that a single district alone cannot significantly impact commuting habits. The project should be collaboratively organized in partnership with the City of Tallinn. Additionally, it’s imperative to enhance the safety of cycling routes in Tallinn overall, not exclusively in Ülemiste City. Lastly, acquiring more data is essential for effectively planning and executing this initiative.
Various metrics are employed to achieve objectives and assess outcomes (e.g., waste generated per employee, extent of green spaces), but the suggested metric could be the City’s ecological footprint. The size of the ecological footprint provides an opportunity to assess whether the City operates within the limits of its biological resources. Kadri Look, a master’s graduate from the Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences, researched the ecological footprint of Ülemiste City as part of her master’s thesis. The research aimed to create a suitable model for calculating the ecological footprint of Ülemiste City, find out bottlenecks in the implementation of the model, and make suggestions for the developers of Ülemiste City to improve data collection.
The primary bottleneck in calculating the ecological footprint of Ülemiste City stemmed from data availability challenges. Companies either are not gathering data for calculating or view the process of retrieving data from their databases as supplementary work. Employees lack the motivation to engage in surveys regarding their consumption habits and provide data. A simple and easy-to-use system for data collection and storage should be set up to implement the model for calculating footprint. A few options to consider are creating a data warehouse to collect and store data in a centralized manner or collecting data through a planned customer portal.
These initiatives will be followed by many more in the future to contribute to the competencies of the Future Citizens project.