Smart Cities: Environmental Challenges and Green Computing

Abstract

Urbanization is an inevitable progression which comes with development. With an increase in population many of the people are now migrating to the cities in increased numbers, which in turn enhance the burden on the infrastructure and resources available in the cities. Increased urbanization will leave behind a more prominent environmental footprint that has its social, economic and environmental implications as well. To provide long term gains to the citizens and in order to make urbanization a positive and productive transformation, three goals need to be achieved— social equitability, economic viability, and environmental sustainability. Social equitability refers to providing an equal access to all resources and benefits across the whole population, economically viable solutions need the recommendations and changes to be financially self-sustaining and environmental sustainability ensures the preservation of the environment for future generations. These objectives have given rise to a paradigm of a new kind of cities referred to as smart city. A smart city uses advanced technology to provide a better life to its citizens and to minimize the effect of human activities on the environment. For making a city smart use of ICT is inevitable. The high end technologies as are used in smart cities such as sensor networks, cloud computing etc. has constantly increasing high computational demands in order to process data and offer services to users, which in turn present a higher economic and environmental impact due to their very high power consumption. The present paper focuses on many environmental challenges posed by these digital technologies and also to suggest ways to deal with these challenges to make these smart cities environmentally sustainable.