AT&T – Isabella Wechsler – 2018

Goals

In 2018, Isabella Wechsler joined AT&T’s Smart Cities Team as an EDF Climate Corps fellow to conduct market research on smart cities technologies. Building off the work of two previous EDF fellows who had been engaged with AT&T’s Smart Cities team, the project also involved an analysis of how smart city products could produce quantifiable sustainability benefits by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Solutions

Throughout the summer, Isabella conducted a market analysis that included an evaluation of: smart city investment expectations and adoption trends; procurement developments for both point-source and integrated smart city services; and funding models employed by cities to date, possible grant opportunities, and emerging financing trends. This research was supplemented by a series of interviews with government officials from both agencies and mayoral offices, and with researchers engaged with cities on projects involving smart city services.

Isabella’s project also focused on transportation for a sector case study and she conducted an assessment of transportation metrics, climate and transportation-related city policies and programs, and available data platforms in 15 target cities. She further used the quantitative model developed by the 2017 EDF Fellow for AT&T to estimate the greenhouse gas savings from deploying Digital Infrastructure to optimize transportation within the target cities in this analysis.

Potential Impact

Isabella produced a set of recommendations around product strategy, tracking systems, and a communications framework to address common city policy interests surfaced during market research and interviews. Modeling the potential impacts of broadly deploying Digital Infrastructure also indicates that these target cities could realize reductions of 3 to 4 percent on average off their transportation-related carbon footprint from managed parking strategies and traffic optimization.