14 DAY TRIAL // The newly-established partnership between the Clinton Foundation and Microsoft Corp, announced on the 17th of May in New York, has the purpose of developing a new technology combining both software and services designed to help the world's largest cities to monitor carbon emissions. The suite of technology tools should also contribute to the reduction of those emissions, as a result of a better understanding of the environmental issues from the world's largest 40 cities. Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft has offered further explanations for this new partnership stating that "Technology has the power to make a positive, long-term contribution to solving the world's environmental challenges".
This partnership will be assisted by ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability and the Center for Neighborhood Technology - which hopes to contribute to the development of the measurement tools by offering Microsoft the knowledge base they have from the development of the older Harmonized Emissions Analysis Tool (HEAT).
Allowing cities to make better decisions regarding their energy efficiency and carbon emissions is the result Microsoft hopes to achieve by means of this project. The initiative will consist of some online web-based software tools that will be available by the end of the year and that will also be compatible with the already-existing emission-reduction tools. The new software tools will also allow cities to collaborate via the web and therefore exchange information that will contribute to everyone's progress. A baseline and a standardized measurement of the gas emissions will also be provided to the 40 largest cities with the support of these new software tools.
The parts involved in this partnership have already clarified their tasks: Microsoft will lead the technical software development, and will also look to establish a consortium of private sector partners, while the Clinton Climate Initiative - a project of the Clinton Foundation - will lead the program and disseminate the software to cities that are interested in reducing the carbon emissions.
The four main features that this online tool should accomplish are the following: enable cities to better measure the gas emissions and the emission reductions; offer the cities a base for future projects for the reduction of carbon emissions; provide the cities with real-time access to any data concerning this matter; and generate reports for the interested users based on the measurement results.