Reflow - Digitization and visualization of a municipality´s hidden resource flows

The main purpose of the project is to establish a proactive, actor-based and comprehensive set of requirements for how a general tool for municipal environmental monitoring and decision support should be designed.

This is done on the basis of the urban development project Norra Djurgårdsstaden and the administrative and cross-company collaboration established with future users within the city of Stockholm, as well as other actors, among them representatives of other municipalities.

The results from this set of requirements will then form the basis for how digitized, visual decision support linked to sustainability work in Swedish municipalities can be designed focused on the cycles of greenhouse gases and energy.

The project produces a prototype for continued development of Reflow.The strategy that dominates environmental work today and that has become practice is to monitor the impact on the ecosystem.

However, this strategy is a reactive approach according to the EU´s so-called DPSIR model (DPSIR=Drivers/Pressures/State/Impact/Responses), it is instead fundamental to understand the cause and consequence of the individual´s and collective´s activities earlier.The DPSIR model illustrates the connections between human activities, impact pressure on the environment, environmental conditions, environmental effects and implemented measures.

Historically, humans have primarily reacted to environmental effects when they have become problems.

By measuring both inflows (e.g. goods, building materials), stocks (e.g. infrastructure construction) and outflows (emissions to air, land and water) and connecting these to human activities, we can earlier understand and assess the impact they will contribute to.

A visual resource flow model could be a decision support for better planning, optimization of flows and stocks and clarifying who is responsible.

The focus must therefore be more on upstream activities, what the inflows to the municipality look like and how they are generated, how efficiently the resources in our municipal systems are used, and what the outflows (emissions) look like.

We also need to gain a better understanding of what role different actors have in controlling the total resource metabolism, i.e. inflows, stocks and outflows from the municipality.The city of Stockholm carries out ambitious sustainability work and strives to become a global role model in sustainable urban development.

This ambition has, among other things, been expressed in new urban development projects, such as Hammarby sjöstad and Norra Djurgårdsstaden.

In the latter case, an ambitious set of requirements, follow-up and data collection work has been going on for several years.

The availability of real-time data on the actual use of resources is partly low and the desired overall picture of physical resource flows and the degree of circularity is still missing.

Norra Djurgårdsstaden, through a political mission, aims to develop an interactive cycle model as a tool for decision support and will in this project constitute a case study, as there is already knowledge and previously completed projects such as Cycle Model 2.0 and a previous Reflow project. Another aim is that the results can be used by municipalities in general.

The project will therefore also turn to other municipalities and gather needs and requirements for how an interactive cycle model should be designed.The most important expected result of the project is to anchor and adapt the implementation of Reflow to the conditions of future users in the city of Stockholm and in Swedish municipalities in general.

A clear sub-goal in the project is to be able to demonstrate a digitized decision support for climate change and energy optimization adapted for Swedish municipalities.The benefit of the project for sustainability work in Swedish municipalities is the application and practical use of previous research results; development of more knowledge-based and effective methods for climate and susta