Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the City, the BABLE podcast where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the City is brought to you by BABLE Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE-smartcities eu.
[00:00:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: So welcome back to another episode, this time coming at you from Madrid in Spain. So, through our partnership with Global Mobility Call BABLE has had the exciting opportunity to host international speakers in thought provoking keynotes and interactive roundtables. As part of this collaboration, we're also recording several podcast episodes. So big thanks to Global Mobility Call for making it all happen. Now, I'm really excited to introduce you to our next guest. Actually, a little background that I actually met him for the first time having a buffet breakfast, I think at a hotel in Malmo in Sweden, and I've been really excited to get to know him a lot better over the last couple of days. He was on a panel with me yesterday and I've gotten the chance to talk a lot more in depth and now we're going to get even deeper and get to know a lot about this city, which I'm very excited about. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you to Ollie Kroner. He's the director of the Office of Environment and Sustainability at the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the usa. Welcome Ollie.
[00:01:49] Oliver Kroner: Tamlyn. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely, my pleasure. So, to get us warmed up, to get us started, I'd like to ask you a bit of a teaser question. And the teaser question I have for you is, can you summarize Cincinnati's environmental and sustainability efforts in just three words off the top of your head?
[00:02:13] Oliver Kroner: Sustainability, equity and resilience.
[00:02:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good. Although I think you used sustainability when that was in the prompt, so.
[00:02:23] Tamlyn Shimizu: I allow it.
[00:02:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: Don't worry, I'm not a strict judge.
[00:02:26] Oliver Kroner: Those are our three themes of our Climate Action Plan. And sustainability means different things to different people.
[00:02:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of all encompassing. I'd love to dig into that with you, actually.
But first, I'd love to introduce you more on a deeper level to the audience. So tell me about yourself. What is your background? What led you to your position today?
[00:02:49] Oliver Kroner: I'VE always been drawn to puzzles and people. And early on I thought that looked like psychology. I went to study psychology at Northeastern University. However, I took a gap year and did a program called AmeriCorps, which is a year of public service in America. I worked in the national forest out in New Mexico and did a lot of nature bathing and a lot of reading and came to land on the fact that the climate crisis would be our generation's toughest problem to solve. So I shifted gears. I studied environmental science, went on to get a master's of environmental science, and went to work for an environmental NGO that did the data behind public health policy. So if you think about air quality, water quality, food safety, etc. It was very analytical role, deep dive into the science.
In parallel to that, I became very involved in what I call micro politics. I became a leader of my community council in Cincinnati and that was sort of a first exposure to how coalitions form, how local government develops change, makes change happen. And our community started pursuing a number of different environmental initiatives, started to get some grants to do work on the ground. And it was at a scale where we could have a conversation, vote on it, and then you could see the impact. And I was really intrigued by that. When the city opened up a role for sustainability coordinator, it looked to me like an intersection of my different skills and interests. And so I put my name in the hat and landed the role. And it's been a dream job ever since. I've grown to the role of director. Now the work, the field is exploding, right? I mean, clearly the climate crisis is hitting us in the face and governments and companies are responding. So our team has grown very significantly in the last couple years even. We're now 20 people large.
If you don't know Cincinnati, we are a city of 310,000 in a metro of 2.2 million. To give you some sense of scale. And we are in the state of Ohio.
In the US you often have very strong climate initiatives coming out of cities, but they interact with state policies in different ways. So that creates a very interesting dynamic in Cincinnati, Ohio.
[00:05:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very interesting. Very interesting background too little follow up question. Do you feel like your studies in psychology have helped you in your role today?
[00:05:39] Oliver Kroner: Absolutely. You know, I think what keeps me in this fight is that it's constant active learning and we are sort of at the intersection of politics and technology and behavior change. And that not that we have to untangle to make these changes happen is endlessly fascinating to me. But the people component is the center of the equation. Right. The. The tech and the politics are people components. So I have heard people say, you know, the technology is only 10% of the equation. You have to get people to use it. And that's 90% of the effort. And I think I agree with that. You know, the relationship building, coalition building, making change happen is really a people behavior.
[00:06:30] Tamlyn Shimizu: Nudging, perhaps as well, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. And you have to really understand how people think.
[00:06:36] Oliver Kroner: Yes. And then attempt to design policies around it. Right. You know, whether that's regulatory policies to prevent certain actions or incentives to nudge behaviors in the right direction. We do more nudging in Cincinnati and in the US Than we do regulating.
And it's working. There's a lot of progress to show from that. So learning a lot from colleagues from other cities and other countries here at the Global Mobility call. But we always take those lessons home and think about how they might apply.
[00:07:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting to hear also, maybe when we talk in a few weeks or whatever, what you've taken back with you. Now tell me a bit more about Cincinnati. Paint us a picture. How does what. What does Cincinnati look like? Tell us about the. The goals, especially related to climate.
[00:07:26] Oliver Kroner: Yeah. So some people might call us an industrial legacy city or a Rust belt city. We grew up around the manufacturing age, right on the Ohio river, way back when we were called Perkopolis because there were more pigs than humans. And the pig economy was really what drove Cincinnati's growth. And then one of the byproducts of pig raising was lard.
It was discovered that lard could be used in soap making. And two gentlemen named Procter and Gamble created what is today the largest consumer products company, starting with soaps. So today, many products around the world originated in Cincinnati.
Beyond that, we have a very strong German heritage in Cincinnati. Very hilly city. I took it for granted growing up. But now as I travel more and see how flat so many locations are, I love hills. I come to learn the views they create, the hillsides that they create. You know, we have very healthy tree canopy because so much of our city is hillside that can't. Can't be safely developed.
But it also creates a number of challenges in the sustainability space, both climate resilience and sustainability planning. We can talk more about that. Maybe we're in the Midwest, if you know the Midwest. We generally have a politeness, friendliness about us that I think holds true in Cincinnati. Very welcoming and warm people, very authentic, you know, in full transparency. I grew up in Cincinnati thinking that this was not the place for me Moved away when I was 18. And through my traveling and living in different locations, I was really the more of the world I saw, the more I grow to love Cincinnati. And a lot of that is quality of the people there. We are socially rich.
[00:09:35] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Really interesting. I actually can't remember if I visited Cincinnati when I was a kid or not. I have to ask my parents about that. But I need to make a visit out to the Midwest for sure.
[00:09:45] Oliver Kroner: We'll certainly come by. We'll show you.
[00:09:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: Will do. Yeah. Would love to. Now tell me a little bit. So we're here at the global mobility call. Obviously we're talking about mobility and talking about how we can make mobility more sustainable. So I'd love to hear what steps Cincinnati is taking to create greener, more equitable transportation options.
[00:10:06] Oliver Kroner: So our work is guided by what we call the Green Cincinnati Plan. It is a climate action and resilience plan. It's organized into a variety of focus areas, all of the different areas of our lives that help drive both climate impact and our pathway out of the climate crisis.
Fundamentally, we start with greenhouse gas inventory, understanding where our carbon comes from in order to create a strategy on how to decarbonize. And In Cincinnati, about 30% of our emissions come from transportation.
Probably no surprise. We are in the US we are very car oriented. We have a variety of other transportation options, but most homes have more than one vehicle and most people drive that vehicle to work and everywhere else.
What's interesting about our region is that because we have so much manufacturing, there's a lot of through traffic. We have a bridge that crosses from Ohio to Kentucky. And I won't have the exact accurate stat, but about 3 to 4% of the gross domestic product of the US crosses that bridge each year. So there's a lot of freight and transportation that comes through.
With all of that cross traffic comes a pretty significant footprint. So what are we doing to address that?
You know, at the highest level, trying to get people out of cars. Right. What other options can we provide to help people live with less reliance on the vehicle? And that looks like a variety of different strategies. It looks like pedestrian oriented communities. It looks like stronger public transit. It looks like micro mobility, if you think about bike share and scooters.
We're in a really interesting moment right now in that in 2020, in the thick of a pandemic, our county passed a transit levy sales tax increase that funds a regional transit improvement.
So we shift from what was predominantly a city transit system to a countywide transit system.
And this has Come with numerous benefits. I want to go back and say though that the the vote and a county of 800,000 people passed by approximately 800 votes. Very tight ballot initiative that won by a hair, but now really sets forth the transformation of our region. So this additional funding means more routes, it means more frequency along those routes. It means an investment in newer plug in hybrid buses.
It means investment in mobility hubs, transit hubs that are really focused on the user interface of the system.
And maybe most excitedly, it means we will be launching bus rapid transit. So we don't have rail lines everywhere like you have here.
In fact, we have an attempt at building a subway system back in the 20s and 30s that failed. And we have a ghost subway system that lies beneath downtown Cincinnati that has never come to life.
So we're in this moment where we are transforming our public transportation system and our policy leaders are recognizing the opportunity now to rethink how our urban design and our zoning policy can be restructured to really enhance transportation. How we build a city of the future around this new public transportation system. So earlier this year they passed a collection of policies that was billed as connected communities.
Basically creates a map along these transportation corridors and rezones them to eliminate density restrictions and eliminate parking requirements and encourage more housing and encourage mixed use. So the hope here is as we do more development along these lines, we can help address what is an affordable housing crisis that we're experiencing in Cincinnati. As many cities are experiencing help drive density, which is arguably the number one urban climate policy we have that cities have at their disposal and bring people closer together.
The closer we live together, the closer we live to our work and our play, the less energy, the less carbon associated with our lifestyles. So this is really a pivotal moment for the city. We won't really see the impact immediately, but over the next five, 10, 15 years, I think you'll start to see a very different city form around this overhaul. The zoning overhaul.
[00:15:11] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting initiatives. I also want to touch on the other systems at play. So obviously some of the things that you mentioned obvious also have a have a role in these. But within, let's say the energy sector, we already touched on transportation, there's waste food systems. All of these are critical areas within your work and within the area of urban plan policy. So which of these has been the most challenging to address?
And maybe you can also go into some examples on effective strategies within those.
[00:15:48] Oliver Kroner: Most challenging is a very difficult question.
We are experiencing challenges in each sector and they look very different.
You know, when you look at the global effort to achieve our Paris Accord targets. There's sort of a one, two punch that we need. We need a shift to renewable energy at scale paired with electrification. And I think most people think about electrification in the electric vehicle market, especially in the mobility space. But we're also talking about everything else and buildings. Electrifying buildings is critical to our decarbonizing goals, but also requires a very extensive overhaul of our infrastructure. So if I had to say, the largest logistical challenge ahead of us I think is electrifying our buildings.
In the US we have a grid system that has been built over the last 200 ish years that is very centralized. We're now moving towards this decentralized grid as there's more and more renewable energy installed on rooftops, community solar installations, and that's forcing new technology, forcing reconsideration of some of our regulatory policy.
So that that push for renewable energy is probably our largest near term opportunity and also where we're experiencing the most prospect progress at the moment.
Also earlier this year we completed 100 megawatts of solar energy. So this is 1,000 acres of solar just outside the city of Cincinnati that powers both city government facilities and feeds into what we call community choice aggregation. So this is, this is a policy where the voters of Cincinnati voted to give city government the ability to bundle all of the residential energy consumption and shop for a provider. So that gives us the ability to purchase renewable Energy delivered to 80 to 90,000 accounts, residential accounts in the city of Cincinnati.
With all of this buying power, we are able to move the market. Right. We can shop at very large scale for clean energy.
So we've completed this project. We are now negotiating for what will be our next big steps towards 100% clean energy by our target date of 2035.
I didn't touch on our electric vehicle efforts and our mobility conversation.
We were very hilly city as I mentioned, and that puts some limitations on where public transit can effectively go.
You know, I mentioned our buses are plug in hybrids. In the piloting with these steep hills, it became apparent that those hills just zapped the batteries of the buses pretty quickly. So they're, they're piloting approach where they geo fence the hillsides, use electric in the basins on the top of the hills, but switch over to the internal combustion engine when they have to go up these hills. So, so that was determined to be the best way to maximize efficiency of this transition.
For a long time we incentivized as a city electric vehicle adoption by offering free parking to any 100% electric vehicle at any city meter. So we launched that back in 2008, before there was any real EV on the market.
Today, we're in a very different place. And adoption has accelerated exponentially. So we're walking that back because it became clear that parking wasn't the linchpin of this. We now need to shift to charging infrastructure. The surveys show that range anxiety and the fear that you will not be able to charge is the limiting factor in adoption. So we are working to provide curbside, publicly accessible charging throughout the city to help address this need.
We're very mindful that you heard me say this yesterday. Many of the day today's problems are created by yesterday's solutions. And we're dealing with very entrenched poverty. We're dealing with very real challenges. You talk about food deserts, places where food is difficult for communities to access.
We don't want to unintentionally create the charging deserts of the future. And we're concerned that if we just let market forces take the lead, that could happen.
So as we craft our strategy, not every neighborhood has driveways in a garage where we can charge at home. Many of them are far more dense and, you know, have multifamily housing. How do we provide sufficient charging infrastructure in those communities? That's what we're really focused on in that space right now.
[00:20:54] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting. Wouldn't people argue that providing the charging infrastructure would be counterproductive to getting more cars off the streets? In some ways that you should more focus your area, more focus on, you know, public transportation, all of that, or how do you see this?
[00:21:18] Oliver Kroner: To be perfectly honest, most people are not arguing that, but I think you're hitting on a realization.
[00:21:24] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, more in my bubble.
[00:21:25] Oliver Kroner: Yeah, no, I think it's a very profound question. You know, is the commitment to vehicle electrification essentially doubling down on a technology, the car that has really proven problematic today we've really over committed to the car. In urban design in America, we have more cars than we have people.
And for each of those cars, we have four to six parking spaces. And you look at the amount of land between the roads, the parking lanes, the service parking lot devoted to car infrastructure.
And it's a. It's really choking our growth today. And this is not highest and best use of our urban space. And now in this push for these walkable communities, there's really a tension between the pedestrian and the vehicle. We have communities that were built in the late 1800s for the walkable citizen. And now we have cars racing through and unfortunately, it's deaths and injuries due to traffic that have really forced this tough conversation and reprioritization in cities like Cincinnati. So we are walking back some of these minimum parking requirements for new developments. We're walking back the ability to allow for surface parking lots in our downtown urban basin, really recognizing that there's much higher and better use, much more economic value, much more public value in development for humans rather than cars in our downtown.
[00:23:13] Tamlyn Shimizu: Do you think we're getting to a place in the US where we can culturally have that discussion around?
In the U.S. i mean, in Europe it's already a charged topic when you talk about taking away cars or car free zones and all of these things. But I'm just wondering, in the US it's even stronger, I think, culturally to, to own a car, whether it's a status symbol or for just convenience and, and what it's meant for the American people. So do you think we're at a place where people are becoming more receptive to those conversations?
[00:23:46] Oliver Kroner: Each community is different and we have communities in Cincinnati that are very pedestrian oriented, are very walkable already, and in those communities that, that density makes pedestrianizing easier and less controversial.
[00:24:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:24:07] Oliver Kroner: You know, during the pandemic, the city was really trying to encourage some sustained economic activity. And there were a number of roadways that became pedestrian only.
And they're lovely, you know, tables on the streets, people on the streets.
When you were there and experiencing that, I don't think anybody is second guessing why if you're trying to drive down there and park, that's a different, different issue.
[00:24:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: People also think it not, not in front of my door, but it's great to have in other places.
[00:24:48] Oliver Kroner: Right.
[00:24:48] Tamlyn Shimizu: But I want to be able to drive and park in my street.
[00:24:52] Oliver Kroner: Yeah, absolutely.
And there is tension around convenience of parking.
You know, all of the behavioral economics shows that the easier you make parking, the more likely people are to drive their car.
[00:25:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:25:06] Oliver Kroner: Right. So as we can walk some of that back, it encourages other forms of transportation.
Full honesty. We're in the very early stages of some of these changes, but people are complaining about traffic speeds, people are complaining about the volume of cars coming through their neighborhoods. So in Cincinnati, we are experiencing more of that right now than we are complaints about lack of parking.
[00:25:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay. No, that's interesting. So it seems to be shifting a little bit of the public perception on what the problem actually is.
[00:25:45] Oliver Kroner: Yes. I mean, fundamentally, we want to design our city for the people.
[00:25:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:25:53] Oliver Kroner: And I think there was a misconception that started in the 50s that we need design for cars, and that's what people really valued. And that is coming undone a bit.
[00:26:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: Can you now deep dive into maybe a favorite project of yours? Sometimes I know it's hard to pick a favorite, but anything that you think would be nice to share, especially the learnings around it.
[00:26:23] Oliver Kroner: We talked about this a little bit already. I, I am most excited about things in the future still. And one of the projects that we're really working hard to execute in this moment is a community solar project that will live on one of our old landfills. This is a landfill that's been in our city for 30 years. It's been very difficult to do anything with economically. We've looked at different buildings, different industrial plants.
A landfill just doesn't work very well between the methane that's still releasing, between the settling that's still happening.
So we are negotiating right now to develop a community solar project. It's about 60 acres of land inside the city.
This has been an environmental justice site. It has been unpleasant to live next door to this for a very long time. We want to turn it into an asset. So we're working to build a solar farm that would deliver energy into the immediately adjacent neighborhoods.
We've secured some funding through the Inflation Reduction act to help make this possible.
And part of the commitment in the grant dollars that we've secured is to deliver 20% energy reduction costs, energy cost reductions to the communities that are participating. So we have the bones now of a transformational project, right?
[00:27:48] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:27:49] Oliver Kroner: You know, very significant climate impact, very significant environmental justice impact that also creates a workforce opportunity and delivers economic benefit to some of the communities that are struggling today.
We haven't talked so much about the poverty in Cincinnati, but about a third of the city lives in poverty, which is very high for a modern city. And those are predominantly our black communities. So how can we correct some of the problems from yesteryear in these solutions that we're designing today?
Talk about lessons learned. We're still actively learning the lessons, but one of the things that we're coming to realize is that public private partnership is really one of the keys to unlocking some of the solutions like this.
I mentioned our large solar array, that's a power purchase agreement. So we don't own that solar array. It's owned by a for profit entity that was able to fully maximize the economic benefits of the tax credits associated with solar energy. And then we can use our purchasing power to finance that project and in exchange receive reduced cost energy. So you see the mutually beneficial partnership that is formed there. Had we done it on our own, we would have essentially paid a premium because we couldn't qualify for those tax credits. And beyond that, we don't have the in house skills to develop solar at that scale.
Furthermore, I'll say that when we issue the RFP for that project, we hadn't envisioned a project of that scale. We had a different idea about what we wanted to do. But when the private market came forward with some of the solutions, it expanded our sense of what was possible and didn't require the city's money up front. Right. So there's this, this magic in finding these sweet spots of collaboration between sectors and I think we can do that in a variety of spaces now. So we're in the final stages of negotiations for curbside electric vehicle charging, which is a very similar model where we'll have a public private partnership with a third party that owns, installs and operates curbside charging.
The city provides the right of way. Our citizens benefit from the new availability of publicly available charging.
[00:30:29] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really, really interesting. That actually was going into my, my next question, which was around partnerships. So I'm really glad that you already touched on that. Is there any other examples of how you're approaching different partnerships, whether it's public private partnerships, partnerships with community stakeholders or other local organizations? That would be important to note here.
[00:30:50] Oliver Kroner: Absolutely.
To come back to the Green Cincinnati plan, you know, this is a plan with 30 strategies and 130 actions.
Far more than our office can take on, far more than city government can take on. You know, the climate crisis is in all hands on deck challenge and we can't get anywhere if it's really top down mandate. So the development of that plan is really community focused. More than 40 public meetings, we collected more than 3,000 suggestions from different community stakeholders and our team works to synthesize all of that and determine what we had. Which of those recommendations were the highest impact, most feasible solutions for us in that process. We now have a plan that is for us, by us and us isn't government. We are one of the local partners. We are the connective tissue of now more than 40 different organizations that have put their names down next to different elements of this plan to help make them happen.
But one of the social solutions that I'm most excited about and that I think Cincinnati is really pioneering is a partnership with some of our local community based organizations, Shout out to Groundwork, Ohio River Valley and Green Umbrella, who are nonprofits in Cincinnati who are very community engagement focused around climate solutions and in partnership with the National League of Cities launched a program called Climate Safe Neighborhoods.
I compare this to market research that a for profit company might do in the public sector. You know, for a long time we get the data, city government decides what a program should look like in order to benefit the citizens. A little bit detached, a little bit paternalistic in a way that has limited uptake and participation in the programs. Climate Safe Neighborhoods looks at where we have the most climate risk from community to community, synthesizing both socioeconomic data, demographic data and climate vulnerability.
And in those communities enters into six to eight week long workshops where community members are paid to serve as the lived experts, subject matter experts in their communities to help both understand what the climate crisis looks like in Cincinnati and in their community, the public health impacts and then also solutions.
So this work with these community members develops a climate resilience map where they highlight where they're experiencing urban heat islands, where they are experiencing challenges accessing public transportation. Grandma can't get on the bus because the bus stops too far away where there are food deserts.
And then creates a map of what solutions their community would prefer to help make this possible.
So then we can take that home back to city hall and think about what partnerships we have in place to help implement on that vision for the future. You know, where our parks, urban forestry department can plant trees to address those urban heat islands, how we can help secure funding to expand food access or install bike share stations that have been requested. And this has really helped activate social infrastructure around climate solutions at a community scale, really gaining a lot of traction, helping building coalitions, helping build support for the issues we're working on.
And then there's this concept of social cohesion.
I think it's becoming more and more common understanding. But the idea that the number one factor that helps a community endure a crisis is actually how well they work together, how well they know each other, how they share information, share resources. And this creates a framework for developing some of that social cohesion in these communities.
[00:35:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really, really interesting. Thanks so much for sharing. So in the past presidential election, we kept on hearing over and over again the number one concern from voters was around economy.
So my question to you is that there are apparently with citizens there are really immediate economic and social concerns. How do you approach balancing this with climate and sustainability concerns? Because it seems like although there are groups of people that are concerned about climate, seems like in the US people and actually in a lot of countries nowadays, they're concerned mostly about the economy. How do you balance these concerns?
[00:36:05] Oliver Kroner: I consider climate the context for Everything, economy included.
Cost of transportation is going up, cost of energy is going up.
We're in a moment of inflation.
However, almost across the board, climate solutions have some near term cost premium and long term cost benefit.
I've talked about a few of these already.
The clean energy work we're doing is delivering reduced cost energy to households and we want to do more of that. You look at the cost of an electric vehicle, typically it costs a little bit more, but over five years of use costs far less. So the more we can shift to a slightly longer term frame of economic thinking, the more sense this makes.
So we're working with our budget office to think through how some of these investments generate a return that can be reinvested in additional cost saving solutions.
There's a whole other side to this. You know, cities are, most cities are self insured. City of Cincinnati is self insured.
When we experience these hundred year storms, and that means flash flooding or landslides or sewer backups, the city is facing the cost for those repairs. And that's not money. We just have in a bank account waiting for the rainy day that comes at the cost of other core governmental services. So there's a real tangible cost of inaction if we're not investing in solutions. Right. And that price tag can be hard to estimate, but I can tell you with confidence that it's going up the trend line in the last 10 years. It's clearly going up and all of the projections show it skyrocketing as we move forward. And you know, a lot of talk about the flooding in Valencia here this week. In the US There was similar events in Asheville, North Carolina.
Cities are really experiencing tragic events.
And if we don't build the infrastructure, both physical and social, to avoid those, I mean, I don't even know what the total cost to Valencia, the total cost to Asheville looks like, but it's far more than any cost premium we're talking about with these sustainability initiatives. So yes, climate finance is central to the equation right now. But the more we can shift away from what's our best ROI over the next one to three years to what's our best RO ROI over the next 10 years or beyond, I, I think the healthier outcomes will be.
[00:39:02] Tamlyn Shimizu: I, I love what, because you, you said this yesterday in our conversation too. The tangible cost of inaction. I love that actually. How do we measure that?
[00:39:16] Oliver Kroner: There have been multiple studies.
[00:39:19] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:39:20] Oliver Kroner: Multiple assessments. And the dollar figures are astronomical.
[00:39:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:39:26] Oliver Kroner: You know, you know, I'm US centric and Ohio focused. There was a recent Study that showed Ohio is looking at $6 billion by 2050 for climate costs.
Huge amounts of money, and that's one small place on the map. Yeah, so that's not my area of expertise, you know, but I can see the trend lines in my city and the increasing costs and the increase in storm frequency, and you can begin to map that out.
[00:40:01] Tamlyn Shimizu: I feel like we're not getting the message across. Like, I feel like that tangible cost of inaction, I don't feel like people understand it, and I don't know if we're doing enough to communicate about it. How do you think for, you know, just thinking of Cincinnati, for example, how can we better communicate and get that. Get those. Those costs across to the people so that they understand better why we're doing the things that we're doing to combat climate change?
[00:40:34] Oliver Kroner: That is a very challenging question.
[00:40:37] Tamlyn Shimizu: I know.
[00:40:38] Oliver Kroner: You know, I think what we have focused on is there's a giant shift happening right now. You know, there's general agreement, maybe I can't say that on the ground in Cincinnati, there's agreement that we need to transition our grid to clean energy. We can see the major Investments of the U.S. inflation Reduction act in this transition.
There's recognition that these federal investments and this economic shift comes with enormous workforce development opportunity.
And that creation of jobs and that creation of projects has been where we have focused these conversations, because I think that's easier for people to understand and see themselves as part of the communities it's part of. So in the development of our climate action plan, workforce was the number one theme we heard from the community. You know, we want to be a part of this and a sense that there is economic opportunity in the implementation.
So that doesn't so much focus on the cost of inaction, but it does focus on the opportunity as we try to transition out of this crisis, and that messaging has gained some traction, we now have to make good on it. Right. There's huge investments happening, and I think it's now up to us to be accountable and help people on the ground, land these contracts, land these jobs to. To implement in their own communities. That's what we're working very hard to create the social infrastructure for today.
[00:42:30] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good point. Last question in. In the main interview part, do you feel like you're missing any tools or anything else that you actually need to accelerate the change that you're trying to push forward? For example, is it about money? Do you need more funding? Do you need more upskilling within their government? What. What tools do you Feel like you're missing.
[00:42:55] Oliver Kroner: I've been thinking a lot around this question.
One of our biggest challenges is something inherent in government. I think in that government in so many ways is sort of built to preserve a status quo and built to limit risk. There's a deep risk intolerance.
However, in the climate space, there's deep need for innovation and need for some risk taking.
And this manifests in real time for our team in the procurement process where we want to an open call for solutions.
However, the way our procurement rules are structured to limit that risk really makes it much harder to get that procurement out the door in a way that we can turn it into an effective contract. I don't know what the solution is there, but there's room for a tool to help us solve for that. I don't know what it is yet, but I'm very actively searching for it.
Right next to that, you ask about financing. Yes. How can we enter into deals that create economic opportunity without giant investment from government, from local government? We do not have a growing operational budget. So how can we partner in ways that bring financing to the table and deliver those mutual beneficial, mutual benefits of public private partnerships? And I think we're seeing more and more of that.
But that combination of procurement for innovation and P3 investment opportunities I think is the sweet spot for really unlocking transformation at scale for climate solutions.
[00:44:52] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really good points. Thank you so much for sharing. Now, I want to ask you if did we miss it anything when we were talking about this? Is there something that you really want to touch on that we didn't yet get the chance to talk about?
Did we cover it all?
[00:45:08] Oliver Kroner: That was a bit of a meandering thread.
I'm just going to think aloud here for a little. Yeah, so along the lines of workforce, I had a recent epiphany. I was at a racial equity training where they were talking about the major federal investments the US has made over the last century. And it talked about World War I and the New Deal and World War II, huge mega events that have shaped our country, shaped our economy. In today's dollars, that was $4 trillion of investment. And the training made the case that less than 1% of that was invested in black owned businesses and black communities.
And you fast forward to today and we have the American Rescue plan and the CHIPS Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction act. That's north of $4 trillion in today's money in a span of 5ish years. So this infusion of economic opportunity is happening on a very tight timeline. Compared to these mega events of the past.
So I think that help helps explain some of the inflation challenges, the economic challenges that we just talked about. But much of the benefit of that is still yet to come. Right. The investment is only starting to turn into, you know, steel on the ground or whatever. You wanted to describe that.
One of the initiatives of President Biden was called Justice 40. It's an executive order that required 40% of that funding land in communities that need it most. So you can see the attempt to course correct those mistakes of earlier, earlier in the century and really invest in disadvantaged communities and communities of color.
And there's so much opportunity there in this transition.
How can we fix some of the poverty and inequity and public health disparities that our cities are really struggling with in this transition?
And it's going to require a combination of innovation and procurement and creative financing solutions.
But that opportunity is enormous and we can't swing and miss on this one.
[00:48:02] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good words there with that. You've already inspired us a lot, but we're going to move to a segment called Inspire Us.
[00:48:11] Tamlyn Shimizu: Inspire Us just a little bit with a story, a quote, or anything that has inspired you recently.
[00:48:23] Tamlyn Shimizu: Do you have an idea of a piece of inspiration?
[00:48:34] Oliver Kroner: Maybe I can just speak through this and you can edit as appropriate.
I find inspiration in a lot of different places.
One of the quotes I'm not going to be able to attribute it, that always stands out to me is the greatest risk to our planet is that someone else will save it.
[00:48:55] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah.
[00:48:56] Oliver Kroner: And maybe I'm paraphrasing that, but I think so many people believe that their actions are inconsequential.
You hear about people say, well, it doesn't matter what I do. There are 100 companies that are responsible for 70% of the world's carbon emissions. And I feel like that is a cop out.
[00:49:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Mm.
[00:49:21] Oliver Kroner: We are buying their products. You know, we.
We are powering our homes with their energy or filling our cars with their petroleum.
I think there's enormous opportunity for individuals to take effect, to have effect.
We in Cincinnati, we have a recycling program, curbside recycling program. The carts that we have have little RFID chips in them. This is a smart city solution. And so when the trucks service those carts, they know who's recycling and who is not. And over the last decade, decade and a half, we've built what is the largest behavioral data set around recycling. And we use that to improve the program.
When we first received the data, we went to the communities that had very low participation door knockers communicated the environmental importance of recycling. You know, this will take so long to decompose in landfill, did that for a few months, went back and watched the data and there was no impact.
Through experimentation, we can see real time impact of different messaging and came to appreciate that the best indicator of whether you recycle is if your neighbor recycles.
And so as we let that sink in, it really provides one of the strongest case studies we have for how the behavioral change aspects of this happen. It is a peer learning, a peer pressure, a conforming challenge. Right. And I think that is the best case for why you listener need to lead by example. The behavior is contagious and it happens with solar installations on roofs. Solar installers call it solar contagion. You can have a neighborhood with no solar installs, but once one home installs, the neighbors start calling. You see it with EV adoption, we each individually need to take a look at our own lives and see how we can reshape the culture around this.
[00:51:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. We're such social creatures as humans, right?
[00:51:41] Oliver Kroner: More than we realize.
[00:51:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for leaving those, those words with us, Ollie. Now I come to our recurring question I ask every single guest and that question is to you. What, what is a smart city?
Is it the hardest question I've asked so far?
[00:51:59] Oliver Kroner: The hardest question.
So obviously the problems we are facing are evolving and they're evolving at an accelerating rate.
Many of our city structures, our forms of government were built a long time ago.
I think smart cities create room for innovation.
New takes on how we govern, new takes on how community voice is brought into the conversation, and new takes on how technology can aid that and help deliver on the key community concerns. So you know, technology takes a variety of forms, you know, so that can mean new improved tools for virtual citizen engagement. It can mean new sensors for, for understanding where we have urban heat island effect and how to address it. There's a whole, whole variety of applications, but smart cities is the umbrella for those conversations.
[00:53:15] Tamlyn Shimizu: The umbrella. I like it. So with that, I just have to thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate getting all of your insights. I learned a lot personally and I'm sure our listeners will too. So thank you for taking the time to speak to us.
[00:53:27] Oliver Kroner: Thank you Tim, and it's always a.
[00:53:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: Joy, always a pleasure and thank you also to our listeners. Of course it wouldn't happen without you. Don't forget you can always create a free account on bao-smartcities eu. You can find out more about smart city projects, solutions and implementations thank you very much.
[00:53:43] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
