Enel to assist Italian municipalities with new Circular City Index

Enel X, the energy services subsidiary of Enel, has launched a new tool to help Italian municipalities to measure their circularity and sustainability levels.

The Circular City Index, developed in partnership with the Department of Economics and Statistics at the University of Siena, is expected to help municipalities to identify barriers hindering the adoption of the circular economy model and how to address them.

The tool can also be used by municipalities to identify their areas of strength and how they can be improved. For instance, municipalities can determine their strength and best practices on digitalisation, environment and energy, mobility, and waste and share with other parties.

The index scores municipalities in line with national and European regulations and standards.

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Francesco Venturini, the CEO of Enel X, said: “The development of the Circular City Index is part of a programme launched by Enel X to make sustainability and the circular economy available to everyone by using Open Data, a valuable yet fragmented resource, which can be processed and returned to the community using indicators obtained through ad hoc models developed and validated by the most prestigious research centres. In this way, we are helping cities to become increasingly sustainable by providing analysis tools based on scientific methods.”

Municipalities have been neglected by previous smart city studies and indexes, according to Enel, hence the need to develop a solution that caters to the needs of smaller towns. Most sustainability studies focus on large urban areas, but only 23% of the Italian population lives in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, while the rest live in small to medium-sized municipalities, according to a statement.

The launch of the tool comes at a time when many Italian cities are struggling with decarbonising their economies to mitigate climate change. However, data and knowledge sharing, detailed approaches and progress comparison with that of other cities will help cities to align their progress with European targets, according to a statement.

Enel Chairman Michele Crisostomo, added: “…urbanisation will grow at global level, leading to increasingly vast, complex and difficult to manage agglomerations. For this reason, redesigning cities to make them more sustainable, liveable and resilient will be crucial for everyone’s quality of life as well as for both global and local environmental sustainability. At Enel, we are committed to making the circular city vision a reality through new design approaches combining different advanced solutions such as renewable energy, electric mobility, as well as tools for cities to monitor and improve their circularity. An example is Enel X’s recently launched Circular City Index, which is available for free to all Italian municipalities to measure circularity KPIs through open data.”

The index also is part of efforts by Enel to develop end-to-end digital solutions for cities. Other solutions developed by Enel to help cities measure and accelerate their smart city progress include the City Analytics, developed in partnership with HERE Technologies to help simplify urban planning for public administrators in developing and deploying connected vehicles, maps and navigation systems.