USAGE interviews María Jesús Fernández Ruiz from Zaragoza Municipality
What is the main role of Zaragoza Municipality in the USAGE project?
Be a use case that serves to experiment with the development of tools and services that help politicians and municipal managers make decisions and help citizens understand the environmental situation of the city.
How can a project like USAGE support a municipality and its innovative governance mechanisms?
In multiple ways: (i) providing a series of tools and services that facilitate data governance; (ii) defining how a public-private green data space for the city should be like; (iii) providing assistance in the design of evidence-based policies.
What are the main Green Deal actions that you want to tackle in the USAGE project?
We consider that there are two pillars of climate action or response to climate change: mitigation and adaptation. Regarding mitigation, it focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To measure whether the actions taken are sufficient, we are going to publish the city's emissions inventory. Adaptation acts on the consequences and includes all actions aimed at avoiding or reducing the potential impacts and risks derived from climate change. For this, we consider it essential to build a visualization service that detects heat islands in the city and that makes it easier to know the context of each of them (characteristics of the people who live there, equipment) and thus face the most correct strategy.