At COP 26 ICLEI Europe revealed key findings of its review of the Google EIE tool, titled “Assessing Transportation Data from Google Environmental Insights Explorer”. The review offers policymakers, city officials, technical experts and municipal transportation planners an exclusive opportunity to better understand how the EIE - created by Google in collaboration with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy - can assist them in accelerating local climate action and in meeting their transport emissions reduction goals. The assessment also provides suggestions for refinement of the tool.

Local governments face challenges in planning due to lack of quality data. This gap is precisely what this analysis on European transport data in cities aims to address. The report provides an overview for cities interested in exploring how Google EIE can support them in promoting low-carbon transport solutions and enhancing sustainable mobility planning.

The EIE tool is an evolving data set, which includes transport data from thousands of cities, of which nine are featured in the assessment: Athens (Greece), Madrid (Spain), and ICLEI Members, Izmir (Turkey), Greater Manchester (UK), Warsaw (Poland), Florence (Italy), Mannheim (Germany), Malmö (Sweden) and Lisbon (Portugal).

The findings show that the EIE allows cities to compare themselves to others in similar areas; an opportunity that few local governments have had access to until now. In addition, the EIE allows cities to monitor their progress over time, helping to improve their emission calculations and in reducing emissions. While the conclusions are promising, they also underscore the need for Google to further optimise the tool’s data modelling processes to meet local realities and to share its transport data sources to support sustainable mobility planning.

Wolfgang Teubner, Regional Director, ICLEI Europe reflects on the importance of new tools to provide data: “In order to be effective in accelerating sustainable mobility and related climate action at the local level, we need access to current, reliable data that provide us with an evidence base. In our digital world, this also means exploring new sources of information to support related decision-making processes. We encourage local governments in Europe to examine the Google Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) tool which, in combination with existing local knowledge and data sources, holds great potential for enhanced climate action.”

The key findings with a focus on policy makers are now available on ICLEI Europe Resources.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the final report.