A connected world: how smart systems are enhancing sustainability

The continuing aspiration for smarter, smoother, more efficient connected and integrated infrastructure is often accompanied by a desire for greater sustainability — though this isn’t always achieved.

In an article for the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia’s (IPWEA) Insite publication¹, David Jenkins looks beyond the tech to question the broader purpose of a smart city. “Technology cannot exist in silos,” he notes. “It needs to be integrated into a holistic plan”, where all technological innovations combine to deliver to the smart city vision.

“Coming from the discipline of asset management, there is a case to be made that smart cities are also about infrastructure and sustainability, not just their environmental impact but also the social and financial ones,” Jenkins continues.

“One way of thinking about it is to ask: what are the features of living in a smart city? The response would be that the city should rate highly for liveability, access, mobility, community and its environment.”

Nature is healing — through smart tech

A 2025 community greening project led by the University of Surrey would seem to fit Jenkins’ requirements. The GP4Streets project is using an array of technological tools to help UK neighbourhoods improve air quality by making their streets greener. Crucially, it places the technology in the hands of the community itself, with residents initially given monitoring tools to measure key environmental factors such as air quality, temperature and water flow. Then, they receive DIY greening kits to help them carry out activities such as planting trees and installing green walls.

As the greening progresses, sensors will track the results of the community’s efforts, with the aim of using the data to fine-tune climate adaptation strategies for UK streets.

Along with the University of Surrey’s Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), the project brings together experts from four other institutions: UWE Bristol, the University of Bath, the University of Sheffield and Imperial College London. Charities and industry partners are also participating in the project, which involves nine local councils.

“Our country’s most vulnerable need a step change in how we adapt to volatile weather and transform built environments, like streets, where limited space restricts the scope for interventions,” said Professor Prashant Kumar, principal investigator on the project and Founding Director of GCARE.

“Working hand in hand with communities, charities, businesses and local councils, we’ll create tailored DIY greening solutions as a ‘prescription’ for urban streets — from green walls to front and back gardens. With state-of-the-art monitoring, communities will see improvements in air quality, temperature and biodiversity firsthand,” Kumar continued.

“This project, building on the foundations of the RECLAIM Network Plus², is about empowering communities to shape a better future for themselves and their loved ones, ensuring they are part of the climate solution.”

Ben McCallan, from the charity Zero Carbon Guildford, said there were multiple barriers to implementing green solutions in the area, “so we are really looking forward to teaming up with GCARE on this project, as we did with the UK’s first ‘living gate’ installation at Sandfield Primary, to see how we can remove those blockers”.

“In Guildford, there are areas that have a frightening level of nitrogen dioxide, and we are keen to work with GCARE to help citizens improve the air quality of their communities.”

Energy transition opportunities

If ever there was a situation that lends itself to the use of smart systems, it’s the transition to renewable energy. The switch from dependence on traditional fossil-fuel-powered stations, which have built-in grid inertia that allows them to respond to surges in demand, to the growing incorporation of a diverse and less predictable array of renewable power sources, calls for a great deal of monitoring and calibration in order to get the demand–response balance right.

Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, has long been an active proponent of smart energy initiatives. Its ‘AI for a flexible electricity system project’, announced in May 2023, is aimed at automating the participation of distributed energy resources (DER) like solar, wind, battery storage and EVs in the electricity market. The project’s key considerations, along with the obvious goal of wanting to reduce emissions, are energy reliability and security, and the integration of a range of technologies that enable real-time sensing, forecasting, control and optimisation.

In the private sector, network management systems from companies like Australia’s Neara and multinational Bentley Systems use digital modelling and AI-powered tools to enable utilities to design more efficient networks that can strategically incorporate a greater amount of renewable energy.

On a more localised level, CSIRO makes its Data Clearing House (DCH) software available to building owners and managers who, among other things, want to optimise the use of energy in smart buildings. DCH is a ‘plug and play’ IoT platform that enables building owners to stream data — from the Bureau of Meteorology, for example — into a central place, then consolidate this data to inform decisions about the use of energy within the building. The platform was used in a trial, launched in 2023, of 200 smart buildings in NSW, with the express purpose of gathering data to inform government on the creation of a flexible energy demand policy and asset register.

Where the forest meets the IoT

Forget about buildings for a moment: are you ready for smart forests? In Lithuania, scientists have developed a high-tech system that seeks to combat deforestation. Dubbed Forest 4.0 (a reference to the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ of the forest industry), their system is an intelligent forest data processing model that integrates blockchain, IoT and AI technologies. It enables real-time monitoring of forest conditions, sustainable resource accounting and a more transparent forest governance model.

The project is the result of a collaboration between researchers from Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania, and Linnaeus University in Sweden.

“Imagine buying a table and knowing exactly from which forest and tree it originated. This is exactly the outcome of the proposed forest data management model,” said Professor Rytis Maskeliūnas from KTU, one of the scientists who helped to develop the system.

Forest 4.0 has multiple layers, with the first focusing on data acquisition and management. This layer gathers information from wireless sensor networks, including various IoT devices that measure factors such as tree sap, temperature and soil moisture.

The sensors, which resemble birdhouses, are installed in trees. “These devices send data to a central system, where it is analysed using AI algorithms within the data analysis layer,” said Professor Egidijus Kazanavičius from the KTU Centre of Real-Time Computer Systems, who developed the hardware.

The system also makes use of cameras already installed in the forest. “By analysing camera images and looking at, for example, browning needles, the IoT can detect the impact of insects on trees, identify disease through spots on leaves, and by encrypting sounds, it can indicate illegal logging,” Kazanavičius said.

Additionally, the Forest 4.0 model uses blockchain technology to provide supply chain traceability, allowing processes to be monitored at all stages, from forest to sawmill or even final wooden product.

Forest 4.0 joins a host of other smart habitat-protection initiatives, including Vodafone’s pilot fire detection system in Greece (2022) and a 2025 project led by the University of South Australia that is integrating remote sensing technologies with machine learning, AI and geographic information systems (GIS) to monitor and attempt to stall the damage to the world’s most fragile marine ecosystems, including the Great Barrier Reef.

A growing body of research on the use of smart forest tech suggests that these practices are gaining momentum. In her 2020 article ‘Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance’, published in the journal Big Data and Society³, Jennifer Gabrys, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, observes that while remote sensing of forests has taken place for many decades, the current scale of observation, “along with the fusion of remote sensing with additional and new digital technologies, is contributing to what is arguably a transformed condition of planetary and forest observation”.

In her analysis, Gabrys questions the implications of approaching forests purely as ‘green infrastructure’. “While some insights from smart cities and smart infrastructure literature are transferrable to an understanding of wider smart environments, there also are numerous unstudied effects and transformations that are unique to these locations,” she cautions.

As smart tech is increasingly applied to the natural environment, with the likelihood of being scaled up in a similar way to smart energy systems, now seems a good time to raise such questions.

<sub>1. Jenkins, D. (2024) It’s not only the tech that makes cities smart. Insite. https://insite.ipwea.org/its-not-only-the-tech-that-makes-cities-smart/
2. https://reclaim-network.org/
3. Gabrys, J. (2020). Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance. Big Data & Society, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720904871</sub>

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