Climate Innovators - Emma Greer from Climateflux
Urban microclimate data processing to make cities more comfortable
In the second installment of the Climate Innovators Interview Series, I talked with Emma Greer from Climateflux. Climateflux advises clients on how to make built environments healthier and more sustainable using a data-driven approach. I met Emma on a project to get my town to consider their approach and this interview gave me a chance to dig into the business side a bit more. Thanks to Emma for taking the time!
By popular demand, below is a transcript of the conversation that has been slightly edited for clarity and readability. I’ll be working on an audio-only version for the next interview in the series.
Dustin: Hi, welcome to the Sustainable Advantages Climate Innovator series. I'm here with Emma Greer from Climateflux. Emma, why don't you tell us about what you do at Climateflux?
Emma: Sure! I am the in-house climate action strategist at Climateflux, which is a Munich-based environmental consultancy specializing in urban microclimate.
Dustin: And so at Climateflux, what is that role like, how do you, what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
Emma: Most days I'm trying to align the services that we offer with what cities and urban practitioners need to move the needle on climate action. I look at policies or urban planning strategies and try to see how our solutions can help cities, and the people who shape them, create a more resilient and livable urban realm.
Dustin: OK, Yeah. So you kind of like greasing the wheels and getting everybody talking to each other that that needs to talk to each other. And so how did you get into that? What was your background before you jumped into Climateflux?
Emma: My professional background is in architecture and urban design. I worked in urban planning and architecture studios for about 10 years between Canada - where I am from - the US, the UK and Italy for a couple of years, and that was great. I would say the bulk of that time was spent working at the intersection of cities and technology - the so-called smart city paradigm or IoT applied to the built environment - and I got a lot of great opportunities to work on global best practices in the smart city space. But over the years I became a little bit less convinced with the idea of international consulting firms copying and pasting their ideas in specific locations and places.
I think for most of us the pandemic was an important inflection point, or at least a moment to reflect on what we were doing. I was looking for something closer to the climate space and wanted to address the climate challenge in cities using the skill set that I had developed in the world of architecture. So I looked for opportunities to deliver climate action for cities, and I got in touch through my own professional network with Climateflux. I really like what they're doing because even if it is very data-driven and technology centered, the solutions or the outcomes are very much place-based and human in their scale.
Dustin: Oh yeah. I mean I guess it helps when you have a professional network! I think probably most people listening to this don't know what Climateflux is. So maybe you could talk about what they actually are and what's the goal of Climateflux?
Emma: Climateflux has two lines of business. We offer consulting services and research & development services, and both revolve around the urban microclimate. Climateflux was founded by two brilliant minds who met at the Technical University of Munich and both spent some time at MIT - at the Sustainable Design Lab and Senseable City Lab respectively. TU Munich and MIT have been responsible for creating a lot of the leading-edge tools for understanding and designing buildings and cities, but many of these tools were development to assess and design indoor environments - energy efficiency, day lighting etc.. This ecosystem set the stage for what would become Climateflux, as the future founders emerged as thought leaders in microclimate in the outdoor urban realm. Imagine the public spaces in your city, your streets, your squares, your bike paths, your parks. There are a lot of tools and a lot of work being done on the indoor environment and the building, but very little understanding and even fewer solutions being developed for those outdoor urban spaces. And that's really where Climateflux comes in. And again, their work pertains to research and development, so developing workflows and tools for understanding and shaping those outdoor spaces, but also technical consulting projects, so providing advice to people who shape those spaces. Those might be policymakers, but they're also landscape designers, architects, urban planners, real estate developers, regional governments, etc..
Dustin: OK, so Climateflux might be selling some services or even some tools and data collection tools especially to pretty much anybody who's making a built environment right, like a government or municipality could be making policy, but also you might have buildings that they're making and then real estate developers might just want to make a nice feeling outdoor environment and might use the consultancy.
Emma: It changes from place to place. Germany is our largest market, so there's definitely influence from both the private and public sector there. But if you look at a city like Singapore, for example, it's heavily driven by the public sector. Whereas in another city, Dubai for instance, their “public” outdoor environments are largely developed by private developers.
Dustin: So yeah, your target audience will change based on the city that you're looking at, right? And that's kind of what we experienced a little bit when I brought you over to look at Cary, NC and we mostly talked with policymakers because they're driving policy for private developers to develop stuff later on. That’s the workflow.
So one of the things that I think is most interesting about Climateflux are these climatewalks. Do you want to kind of walk through what that is a little bit and talk about how that's a little different than how people normally look at the urban microclimate?
Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy that you flagged this project because it's certainly one that is very close to my heart and much of my day-to-day job is finding the market for this really exciting solution. This initiative spun off of the research work that the two founders were doing at TU Munich, so much of the research and development that went into it was done in an academic setting. Essentially, climatewalks is a participatory process for building citizen-powered data ecosystems around microclimate. We engage citizens in collectively understanding and mapping the microclimate conditions specific to their neighborhood. This approach differs from the status quo in that typically cities are using satellite data to understand the general microclimate conditions, for instance heat mapping using Landsat data, and that really doesn't capture the granularity of the microclimate conditions in the urban environment. There's so much variability in material and massing. You can't assume microclimate conditions outside your door will be the same as two blocks over. It varies immensely, and it also varies from person to person. I might be fine in 35°C weather, but that might be way too hot for you. Maybe you didn’t have access to air conditioning last night and you're already heat stressed before you leave the front door. There's a range of factors that play into how each of us individually experiences the urban microclimate and the climatewalks process takes that into consideration. The initiative is formatted around walking tours, so you get a group of people together, it can be community members, policymakers, designers, local community groups, and you go on a walk, or on a cycle, carrying this portable weather station. You're collecting high resolution microclimate data in a neighborhood along a route. At the same time the participants are submitting their experience of climate conditions through a web-based survey. So you're collecting both an objective reading of climate, again at a very high level of resolution, and you're also collecting data on how individuals are experiencing microclimate conditions. This information sets the stage for making decisions about how we can create more comfortable outdoor environments that consider how each of us individually are experiencing microclimate in the city. It's a great way for urban practitioners and policymakers to kick off a heat resilience strategy, for example, or an active transportation plan in a specific neighborhood.
Dustin: That's really a cool data collection that there's no substitute for. I think you have to go and do the hard work to get 15 or 20 people on a walking tour behind you with, with like a phone, you know, saying, "I feel terrible right now," "I feel okay right now," and match that up with the data. Especially here in North Carolina, the difference between shade and sun is extremely large, especially in the summertime. And so that's why I thought it was a pretty interesting project because you get this data that you really just can't collect unless you actually have boots on the ground walking your normal kind of route that you would take. You know, if I'm going to build a mixed-use development somewhere and I expect people in these apartments or townhouses to be able to walk to the grocery store, well, maybe I want to walk that route and see if maybe I should put some more trees in or something like that. And then I think that that's excellent.
So, a question more like to the business side of Climateflux, would you call it a mission-driven business or is it more like a for-profit business? How would you characterize Climateflux at this point?
Emma: We are definitely a for-profit company, but we set the bar pretty high in terms of prioritizing impact and holding ourselves to evidence-based recommendations of the highest quality. We're not going out there saying we can do this whole mixed bag of services, it's quite a focused set of services that are on the leading-edge of the science, backed by the rigorous academic institutions from which the founders emerged. I think while there is the ambition to grow quickly, we're looking for the types of clients that can take that insight and deliver action on the ground. Dustin: You're not looking to just sell consulting services and then move on to the next thing. You want to actually see people follow through with the actions that have been kind of recommended. But at the same time, you're not doing it for free. It's not a philanthropic endeavor on its own. You think there's a market where people who live in the areas that have been built using some of these concepts. That Climateflux is putting out there in the consultancy will actually be happier and demand it in other places. Is that kind of the idea?
Emma: Yeah, and I think climatewalks is actually a really great example of this. The participatory aspect of that service offering isn't strictly necessary for the main value proposition, which is the data that you're collecting through this mobile weather station. It's that it has a huge impact in terms of building consensus around a new initiative, just getting people in a room, talking about a project, talking about what could be improved in their neighborhood does a lot to move that needle from just pure insight to inclusive action that incorporates ideas and the needs of the individuals who actually live in that community.
Dustin: Right. So I got that nice little community push. It starts to drive forward because nobody likes to be miserable when they're walking around outside. I think that's a pretty consensus opinion, but at the same time when they look at the trade-offs of what you're going to have to have in order to make that happen.
Emma: Yeah, it helps moves consensus from the “not in my backyard” to “yes in my backyard”.
Dustin: So just kind of thinking about forward at at Climateflux. What would you say kind of holds up growth or where you want to go with the company? Is it, is it more like just get to operations? Is there some product market fit that you're trying to explore? Like what are people kind of resistant to the ideas so you have to do a little bit more work to grease the wheels What do you, what would you say is kind of the biggest hold up?
Emma: There are a lot of milestones in our growth strategy. It's really such a remarkable story. It's almost as if the solutions appeared without a clear understanding of the problem. To a certain respect, they found a natural market. We've made assumptions about the value that we assume people have found in our work as they continue to come to us. At the beginning with very little, let's say intentional business development, and now we're kind of in that stage of saying do our clients past, present and future see the value that we think they do or are they seeing something else that we're we're not yet capitalizing on in terms of marketing and business development. So understanding ourselves is definitely one of those milestones.
There's a remarkable amount of public funding, not so unlike the IRA funding that's come out recently in the US. The European Commission has been very generous, and intentional with its grants and a lot of, for instance, the research and development work that we do is funded by European, national, regional, and even local funding, and that has really allowed us to test our solutions and to work with a diverse set of stakeholders. For instance, to work with sociologists and anthropologists on the climatewalks initiative, to test solutions for bikers and pedestrians to find the most comfortable outdoor path using AI-driven microclimate prediction, etc. So we've been able to do a lot of experimentation with that R&D vertical.
Moving forward we would like to really push on the consulting side. In order to move that needle from insight to action, we want to work with the people who have levers to improve the built environment, especially those kinds of lovable public spaces that make our cities great places to live.
In this sense, I would say that the emphasis right now is to sprint ahead with the consulting work and to continue to develop partnerships with other fields that can give us new perspectives on the theme of the urban microclimate.
Dustin: OK. Yeah. So I mean that's kind of what's coming next. You feel decent about the technology and the data side, but want to keep experimenting and then and then kind of keep getting boots on the ground on consulting, I think that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Emma: Yeah, I'm glad you think so. But as you know, you've been instrumental in helping us test some of those value propositions. So big thanks to you Dustin.
Dustin: Yeah, I'm trying. I think it's, I think it's a really interesting project. I like the climate walk stuff. And you know, I encourage anybody listening to this to go check out Climateflux. Check out their climate walks project. It's not that hard to get it into your city and get people to start thinking about it. You know, you kind of have more power than you think you do if you, especially if you live in the United States. So, Emma, I appreciate you talking to me today and we'll chat again soon.
Emma: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dustin.