Local digital twin

Digital twins for Amazon sustainability

Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, and Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, recently argued in a Mongabay op-ed how digital twins could support policies to protect and conserve the Amazon while improving people’s well-being by encouraging them to expand green bio-economic activities.

They pointed out that digital maps can help understand the forest ecosystem in more detail than ever before. Using LIDAR and AI technologies, it may soon be possible not only to map and digitalize each individual tree from crown to root, but also to understand and scan how different species are connected to the surrounding topography and how each part of the ecosystem relates to the land around it – i.e. a complex approach-.

Digital twins can therefore help to clarify the relationships between rainforest ecosystems and the cities embedded within them. This includes complex and informal neighborhoods that remain unmapped. Based on this new amount of data and knowledge about the Amazon rainforest, it could be possible to help protect the ecosystem from environmental crime and unsustainable development by promoting and encouraging green alternatives.

Follow this link to read the full article:

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/11/can-digital-twins-help-save-the-amazon-commentary/

If you are interested in the activities of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, follow this link:

https://senseable.mit.edu/

And for the Igarapé Institute:

https://shorturl.at/FMO26

Image source: MIT Senseable City Lab.

Smart Metaverse City – Digital twins cities

According to Charitonidou (2022), digital twins are virtual replicas of cities that are used to simulate environments and develop scenarios to address policy issues related to urban planning (e.g., sustainability, climate change, transport, etc.). Recently, Xu et al. (2023) published the chapter “Toward a Smart Metaverse City: Immersive Realism and 3D Visualization of Digital Twin Cities” in “Advances in Scalable and Intelligent Geospatial Analytics” (Durbha et al., 2023). The publication presents a conceptual prototype that combines the unique advantage of metaverse technology with the two-way connectivity of a digital twin city application.

This combination offers the possibility to create a virtual environment for immersive geovisualization that provides the opportunity to understand the complex urban system through science-based and data-driven approaches. The proposal and its real-world applications are discussed based on a twin city developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to facilitate participatory, smart and sustainable campus management.

More about this publication could be find in the following link:

https://shorturl.at/bxCDX

If you are interested in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory initiatives, you could follow this link:

https://www.ornl.gov/

Image:World Economic Forum

References:

Charitonidou M. (2022). Urban scale digital twins in data-driven society: Challenging digital universalism in urban planning decision-making. International Journal of Architectural Computing. 2022;20(2):238-253. doi:10.1177/14780771211070005

Durbha, S.S., Sanyal, J., Yang, L., S Chaudhari, S., Bhangale, U., Bharambe, U., & Kurte, K. (Eds.). (2023). Advances in Scalable and Intelligent Geospatial Analytics: Challenges and Applications (1st ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003270928