News reporter Toyah Höher draws insight into climate issues in Amsterdam through the employment of data and technology with potential solutions. 

On Oct. 9, to an ironically upbeat background tune, The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) released its annual report on climate scenarios in the Netherlands, warning of drought and further extreme weather if CO2 emissions remain at current levels: “Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the climate will continue to change for a long time, with major consequences for the Netherlands.” 

In just over two years, Amsterdam will celebrate its 750-year anniversary. According to Titus Venverloo, the lead of the Senseable Amsterdam Lab in the AMS Institute, “looking at those climate scenarios, we’re not going to make it to another 750.”

Titus works at the forefront of research and technological development toward a carbon-neutral Amsterdam: the AMS Institute was founded in 2014 as a collaboration between TU Delft, Wageningen UR and MIT. The latter set up the Senseable Amsterdam Lab, which uses computer vision, AI and big data to dream up and develop solutions to an impressive range of urban problems. The institute’s research portfolio includes circularity, urban mobility, food systems, climate resilience, urban energy and responsible urban digitalization. It offers a 2-year Master’s degree from Wageningen and Delft in Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering.

One morning, Titus is kind enough to invite me to the Lab, and excitedly introduces its astonishing abundance of research projects, including GPS-monitoring of bike theft, ultrasound particle sensors on construction sites, monitoring insect biodiversity through AI, electric trash boats, air traffic noise pollution, crumbling bridges, community fridges, algae sensors, aqua-thermal heat basins, positive energy districts, second-hand timber-sharing, real-time CO2-monitoring in traffic, 3D-printing bridges, and temperature and air pollution sensors ingeniously installed on top of garbage trucks. 

Yet these issues merely scratch the surface of contemporary issues of urban engineering. Amsterdam faces “complex challenges on all fronts,” he tends to repeat. “There’s just so much to solve. Literally everything needs to be solved.”

The Senseable Amsterdam Lab works with the Senseable City Lab, which has pioneered the collection of large-scale data on cities and how they work for the last 20 years. “This is what the lab is known for,” Titus notes. “Whenever there’s a new data source, such as images of cities, the lab is very quick to build technologies that allow us to study cities with that. Sometimes you build the technologies and people collect new information. But it’s just data–there are no insights. Our lab produces the tools to combine the two.”

In climate terms, focusing on cities makes sense. Although they comprise just 2% of the Earth’s crust, 55% of the world’s population lives in cities, consuming 70% of the world’s energy. 75-80% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to cities.

While at this point, the existence of human-induced climate change isn’t rocket science, Titus acknowledges, its effects might as well be. “A solution to one problem will create its own problems.”

The average temperature of the Netherlands has already risen by over 2 degrees celsius since 1901. Yet before heat, perhaps the biggest danger posed to the country is rising sea levels. “We’re already on the water–we’ll deal with it. But it’s not great, and the uncertainty in predicting sea level rise is absurdly high,” Titus explains.

Rescinding water levels due to drought, on the other hand, are also a problem. “Because Amsterdam is based on poles, if the water level drops too low, the poles will rot and the city will collapse. Wonderful.”

Around 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions attributed to Amsterdam are those caused outside the city as a result of consumption: think of material flows, food, construction materials, and everything that’s imported into the city. Amsterdam was one of the first to monitor this dimension of emissions, known as scope 3 emissions. Initial estimates attributed only 40% of emissions to this category, Titus remarks, underestimating the total material flow by a factor of 65. Scope 3 emissions are excluded from the Amsterdam Climate Neutral Roadmap 2050. The issue of attribution of emissions from imported materials is “a huge question,” Titus admits. “And we don’t really have a plan for it.”

Another major challenge facing Amsterdam’s road to carbon neutrality is congestion on the city’s electricity grid, which is itself relatively old. The current grid does not have the capacity to fully electrify mobility. One idea Titus mentions is to use tram lines as distribution networks at night, when they would otherwise stay dormant. These leftover capacities could also be used to charge batteries and electric vehicles overnight. 

In the long term, however, Amsterdam’s entire system needs revamping, including the canals. Watching construction sites occupy Amsterdam’s picturesque cityscape has sparked debates about the city’s status as a living museum. In Titus’ opinion, “we have a wonderful opportunity to give everything a makeover while keeping the historic looks of the city the same. (…) It’s a museum where people live. What’s the trade-off between the museum and sustainability challenges?”

One of the Institute’s notable innovations is to return Amsterdam’s canals to some of their historical purposes; hundreds of years ago, the canals were used for defense, transport, floating markets, sewage and trash services, to name a few. Research at the AMS Institute has resulted in prototypes and trials of self-driving electric boats to re-adopt some of those functions. In this way, emissions and congestion from garbage and delivery trucks are spared while reclaiming space that is currently reserved almost exclusively for pleasure boating. “[The canals] weren’t meant for drunk British tourists,” Titus quips. “They were meant to have an urban function.”

Some urban issues are rarely addressed because researchers simply lack the funding for it. Through their cooperation with the municipality, AMS researchers like Titus can get more creative with their projects than they would otherwise be able to. Take noise pollution from air traffic: as part of their urban comfort lab, they were able to set up “120 shipping containers in three courtyards with different configurations” in a lot south of Schiphol to determine which roof models, for example, might best reduce disturbance. Without help like that coming from the municipality, and the vehicle of an institute like AMS, he notes, “researchers never get to do (things like) this.”

Research can discover problems, define them, explore them, and build technologies to solve them. But how are these connected to the urban challenges? “The device in itself? It’s just the gimmick,” Titus declares. “What you can do with it, that’s the interesting part.”

“Because the city is a partner on almost all the projects, we’re able to implement projects quite rapidly, meaning we have a faster science-to-implementation track. It’s a really nice partnership. We get a lot of freedom to develop.” While researchers like Titus know to appreciate political willingness to invest in sustainability challenges, funding isn’t the end of the story: “In the end, you do actually need to build the infrastructure. If we did develop a new energy infrastructure it is going to cost a couple of billion. It’s not going to be easy, but Amsterdam has quite a lot of political courage to say ‘let’s go’, let’s do these things. But it does operate in a political context. So the question is: are we going to get there on time? And I would be crazy if I said yes.” 

Why are legislative approaches still lacking in Amsterdam’s road to carbon neutrality? Arjan Hassing is a Circular Innovation Strategist for the Gemeente Amsterdam and the Project Lead of the CircuLaw platform, which aims for more and better use of existing legislation to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy by helping local and regional governments find impactful legal instruments and apply them. CircuLaw’s research on exactly this question resulted in the finding that civil servants are unaware of or hesitant to use the instruments available to them: “In practice, it appears that civil servants who have to adopt these instruments are usually not legal experts themselves. The complexity and incoherence of the legal framework can paralyze them, and it takes a lot of time to plow through the enormous piles of laws in different areas.” 

Arjan tells The Amsterdammer that legislative instruments are a crucial tool for any city to reduce and adapt to climate change, and especially to meet Amsterdam’s circular goals. Change in this area will require “creating more awareness amongst civil servants that legal instruments are a vital part of the circular transition, making sure that they are able to navigate through the complexity of the legislative systems,” and “providing help and guidance in the application of the instruments.”

Titus insists that a political ecosystem in Amsterdam that prioritizes sustainability is “a necessity, because if the Netherlands is not going to invest, if we’re not going to be a pioneer (and we have not been pioneering enough), who else is gonna do it?”

The meticulous detail and dedication with which each project he introduces is dreamt up and carried out is inspiring. Still, the issues we discuss barely scratch the surface. “You need to look at all the other aspects of a climate-neutral city,” Titus remarks. “We try to do this with a pretty crazy team of technology nerds. We’re trying to build all these different solutions and monitoring tools to at least enable the city to transition quicker.”

And how might we do that after all? Through the small actions of the many, maybe. Titus’ call for action for students is the following:

“It’s a massive challenge, and anything really helps. What we do, and what we love to do, is develop technologies that can help cities. So if you’re interested in technologies, in any way, just go for it. Build your solutions, see what happens, just go for it. Because it’s no longer a question of ‘should we do this’ or ‘should we do that’. It needs to be everything. Young people can be such an amazing driving force for innovation in cities. We can be the rebels, the developers, the technologists who actually put all these options on the table. So I would say, go get ‘em. That would be my advice.”