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Merging Onto the Green Lane with IBSG

IBSG Chief Technologist David Evans and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom speak to Fox Business News about how Cisco Connected Bus helps reduce the global carbon footprint.

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Connected Urban Development (CUD) is a partnership between Cisco and cities around the world to create urban communications infrastructures that demonstrate how network connectivity can reduce carbon emissions in urban environments. By using network connectivity for communication, collaboration, urban planning, and other activities, CUD will help change the way in which cities do the following:

• Deliver services to residents
• Manage the flow of traffic
• Operate public transportation
• Use and manage real estate resources

Changing the way cities operate has a positive impact on the ways in which citizens work, live, and play.

Launched in 2006, CUD is a 5-year program, in which Cisco has invested US$15 million in people, research, and equipment to help create a global community of cities committed to addressing environmental sustainability.

Connected Urban Development is one of two Cisco initiatives that were born from Cisco’s participation in the Clinton Global Initiative, an endeavor of the William J. Clinton Foundation to develop innovative solutions for some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

The second initiative, Carbon to Collaboration, is an internal program that focuses on reducing the overall carbon footprint of Cisco employees by 10 percent in 2008. To do this, Cisco encourages employees to replace air travel with communications tools that allow meetings to be conducted in a virtual collaboration space over the network.

In the first phase of CUD, partnerships were established with the cities of Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Seoul to support their innovative use of technology in reducing carbon emissions, while fostering economic growth at the same time. During this phase, Cisco and the city and county of San Francisco co-hosted the first Connected Urban Development Global Conference in San Francisco, February 20-21, 2008, bringing together city business leaders and planners, researchers, and academics from around the world to share best practices in sustainability and develop innovative environmental solutions. (Read more about the CUD Global Conference in San Francisco)

Now in its second phase, CUD welcomes four additional cities—Madrid; Lisbon; Hamburg; and Birmingham, England—to this collaborative community. Each will focus on developing information and communications technology solutions to meet their own, specific environmental and transportation challenges. (Read More about Connected Urban Development)

The next Connected Urban Development Global Conference will take place in Amsterdam, September 23-24, 2008. The topic of the Amsterdam conference will be "Broadband for Sustainability."

Visit the Connected Urban Development collaboration website
Download Connected Urban Development Global Conference San Francisco Presentation Materials