Zaragoza
Zaragoza is a city and a municipality of Spain, capital of the province Zaragoza and the autonomous community of Aragon. It is the fifth most populated municipality in Spain with 682,513 inhabitants, with an area of 967km2, and it is located in the central part of the Ebro valley.
Zaragoza has a long tradition in open data publishing, leading many of the efforts by municipalities in Spain in this respect, and geospatial data management, with its Spatial Data Infrastructure and the program “Mis Mapas, mis Datos” (My maps, my data), to increase knowledge about geospatial and environmental data in the city and contributions from citizens.
European Green Deal priority actions
Zaragoza is integrated in the EC Mission of 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2023. The municipality prepared during 2022 its Zaragoza 2030 Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Plan de Adaptación al Cambio Climático de Zaragoza, PACCZ), as part of the commitments acquired by the Zaragoza City Council within the European Pact of Mayors for Climate and Energy. This plan was approved by the Zaragoza’s Government on April 13th, 2023.
There are two main pillars of climate action or response to climate change for Zaragoza:
Mitigation: It acts on the causes of the phenomenon. It focuses on actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere, such as CO2 or methane, derived from human activities that cause global warming and climate change. In addition, it focuses on increasing the capture (absorption) of CO2 by what is called a sink, such as forests.
Adaptation: This action acts on the consequences, and it includes all actions aimed at avoiding or reducing the potential impacts and risks derived from climate change, reducing vulnerability and exposure to them and increasing the resilience of societies and ecosystems.
Challenges to be faced
Reinforcement of the vision of Data Governance in the organization and institution. To do so, open and interoperable technologies and tools will be employed.
Establishment of policies defined by decisions based on data evidence.
Improvement of the existing environmental indicators. Through standardization, Zaragoza wants to promote the transformation of raw data into decision ready information.
Expected impact of USAGE
Obtain and incorporate into their departments, the tools and services generated within this project, improving the technological infrastructure of the organization.
Increase the number of data sets: Generating and publishing as open new environmental datasets.
Improve the quality of existing data: Improve the quality of metadata, improving its interoperability and reuse.
Improve and augment environment visualization services: Taking advantage of data improvement and the growth of new data sets.
Zaragoza data2policy stories ... dealing with emission inventory in city data space
In 2022, the Zaragoza city council prepared the Zaragoza Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Plan de Adaptación al Cambio Climático de Zaragoza, PACCZ 2030), which aims to accelerate the decarbonization of the city. Furthermore, in 2022 the European Commission chose Zaragoza as one of the cities of the action 'Mission 100 Climate Neutral Cities by 2030: By and For Citizens'. This mission sets the goal of the city being climate neutral by 2030. Among the main actions carried out to meet this objective, the city seeks to promote the use of digital and technological resources. Among these we find the Emissions Inventories, a series of resources that allow us to assess the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions in the city. The emissions that are collected are based on the sectors that are of direct municipal action, such as mobility, residential, public and institutional services and waste management.
USAGE provides support to Zaragoza in publishing these inventories at two levels:
Publish emissions data in a harmonized and interoperable manner using resources such as standard vocabularies and ontologies, thus promoting open and reusable science (FAIR).
Develop an emissions visualization service adapted to three levels of users: decision makers, citizens and technicians.
The main objective is that these resources serve as decision-ready information that politicians can use to make decisions, but that at the same time are useful to inform and raise awareness among citizens.