On April 9, 2021, the launch ceremony of the UNDP Demonstration Project for Sustainable Development and Innovation in Suzhou was held in Suzhou New District. Tian Feng, Dean of SenseTime Intelligence Industry Research Institute, delivered a report under the topic of "Green Digital Tools and Urban Green Asset Management" at the closed-door seminar "Green Technology Innovation Tools Advance the Realization of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development".

Tian Feng:

"Green cities are zero-carbon cities. On September 22, 2020, at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that China aims to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. Against the background of "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality", AI will play a major role in the following aspects:

1) Zero-carbon city: Using computer vision as infrastructure, the video data of digital twin cities is used to calculate the low-carbon behaviors and measure green assets of the city, such as the annual number of trips made by new energy vehicles/bicycles and total time, the carbon footprint of smart factories and smart industrial parks, etc. Additionally, Internet video is used to realize tele-medicine, tele-education, tele-commuting, and tele-conferencing, thereby reducing the total carbon emissions in daily production and life for citizens.

2) Green transportation: There are 372 million motor vehicles in China as of 2020, which will surpass the United States in 2021 as the world's number one nation in terms of car ownership, making green transportation a key factor in its carbon neutral strategy. According to a forecast by Morgan Stanley, autonomous driving technology can not only reduce car accidents by 90%, but also reduce traffic congestion by 30% and greenhouse gas emissions by 15.9%. From 2017 to date, SenseTime's self-developed minibuses and sedans with L4 autonomous driving technology equipped with global leading technologies such as 10cm-level high-precision maps and vehicle-road connection have been tested and operated in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Japan. Through cooperation with many new energy vehicle manufacturers, SenseTime will continue to make contributions to low-carbon travel in China.

3) Green AI Supercomputing Center: According to IDC data, the transformation of data centers to cloud computing in the next four years (2021-2024) can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1 billion tons. Under the traditional model, every enterprise establishes an independent data center to ensure peak computing requirements, wherein the average utilization rate is less than 18%, causing a huge waste of energy. However, SenseTime builds AI supercomputer centers in regions around the world and allocates intelligent computing infrastructure in a centralized manner, significantly saving the total energy consumption for society as a whole.

Beate Trankmann, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative for China, delivered a speech at the launch ceremony and expressed that, with the launch of today's cooperation project, the UNDP will work closely with Suzhou to support the city's transition to low-carbon, high-quality and sustainable development. This project will also facilitate the joint R&D, promotion and application of advanced green and low-carbon technologies, promote the development of green technology innovation demonstration projects, and build a high-level, globalized and collaborative community of green innovation.

According to Zhou Yan, Director of the Project Office of the UNDP Demonstration Project for Sustainable Development and Innovation in Suzhou, this Demonstration Project was jointly established by the UNDP, the China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges, Ministry of Commerce of China, and the Management Committee of Suzhou New District, with technical support from Green Technology Bank. With the vision of "carbon neutrality", this Project aims to actively promote low-carbon urban development, follow the principle of "people-oriented and green-first", and utilize green and scientific methods to innovate the standard system for green and scientific cities and achieve sustainable and refined management of cities.