Climathon Bratislava

Theme  

The challenge of the second year of Climathon 2021 was to find solutions that would make the City of Bratislava more resilient to climate change.  

Participants could focus on various areas such as prediction and visualization of climate stressors (heat islands, floods, etc.), more efficient planning of renewable resources, or optimization of waste management, public transport, and electromobility.   

Participants and teams 

In the second year, 120 participants joined the challenge, of which 50 joined online, and 70 were present in the modern coworking spaces of HubHub. During the weekend, the teams worked on valuable and innovative solutions, and together they brought 15 projects, of which the jury chose the best three. When creating solutions, the teams had actual data available from the City of Bratislava, Swiss Re, and the companies Solargis, Meteomatics, ZSE, and the city´s company OLO. 

Mentors 

Experienced mentors guided the participating teams from various fields such as energetics, transportation, technology, and the environment. This year, more than 25 mentors were present, and together with the participants, they created ideas that the teams turned into functional solutions.  

City of Bratislava: Ivana Maleš, Eva Streberová, Petra Dzurovnčinová, Martin Vavrek

Swiss Re: Uwe Nagel, Lukáš Csóka, Jakub Ševcech 

ZSE: Marek Tomeš, Miroslav Bištuť, Rastislav Žembery, 

Other mentors: Guido Oswald, Pavol Magic, Vladimír Klimant, Marek Lavčák, Michal Laco, Martin Veselý, Kai Pham a ďalší  

Winning solutions 

The winning team KANthon created a solution in the form of a comparator, thanks to which it is possible to evaluate the length of the journey by car compared to public transport between different places in Bratislava. Thanks to the data in the comparator, it is possible to find out which routes are worth taking by public transport and which by car.  

Second place went to Ecothusiast, which created a tool capable of identifying the presence of heat islands in different parts of the city based on several factors. The benefit for the city is detecting temperature changes after planting greenery on specific streets.  

Third place was awarded to the UnderBranc, who came up with the idea that makes waste collection more efficient. The mobile app allows residents to notify when the trash can is full easily.   

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Themes 

During the first year of the Climathon, the City of Bratislava defined two challenges that the participants had 48 hours to deal with.  

1. How to motivate citizens and involve them in transforming Bratislava into a resistant city to climate change? 

2. How to increase the use of urban transport and ecological transport alternatives in the city?

Participants and teams 

In the first year, 150 participants from 8 countries participated in the search for solutions, who were divided into teams of 3-7 participants. During this weekend, the participants came up with 25 resulting projects, the best of which were piloted and tested in the city.  

Mentors 

While working on technological solutions, the teams had at their disposal 26 experienced mentors from various fields, including data analytics, transportation, the energetics sector, and climatology. Thanks to their expertise and experience in the area, they were able to help the participants create feasible and viable projects. 

City of Bratislava: Headliner: Eduar Donauer, Milota Sidorová, Pavol Škápik, Tomáš Peciar, Petra Dzurovčinová

Swiss Re: Headliner: Lukáš Csóka, Uwe Nagel, Alicia Montoya, Jakub Ševcech 

Other mentors: Vladimír Klimant, Matej Gálik, Adrián Gubčo, Pavol Magic, Pavol Vančo, Andrej Garaj, Kristína Korčeková, Marcel Klimo, Ján Búza, Heliodor Macko 

Winning solutions 

Holandská spojka is the winning idea that offers cities and residents data on overheating individual city locations. Along with this solution, the Holandská spojka provides specific ways that the municipality can prevent overheating (expansion of greenery). In the application, it is possible to see what effects the recommendations will have on the temperature in the given location. 

The winning project of the student category – Swiss Re Students, came up with the idea that thanks to machine learning help to predict city traffic delays and increases the reliability of the arrival of public transport vehicles on time. By using data on the hold of connections from previous months, the system can reduce this time in peak traffic by up to 47%. This service should be integrated into the standard mobile application of the transport company. 

Other award-winning solutions: 

Main Category  

Clima-x is a crowdfunding platform where you can round up the amount for your purchase and use it to support green city projects.  

Student category  

The City Intelligence Lab team’s project offers an idea in the form of an app for cyclists and pedestrians that can calculate their route to avoid possible rain. This idea has great potential in Bratislava because it rains almost 30% of the days a year.  

Geo-Idea Special Prize  

It acquired the GOOD solution offering an analytics website that integrates and evaluates data from green urban areas and models their impact on air pollution. It can help the Magistrate of the capital city make better decisions. 

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Theme

Team from the third year of Climathon Bratislava  created innovative technological solutions that  improve life in the city and mitigate the impact of climate change.

The participants had three challenges to choose from: how can the city optimize its services in case of extreme weather and climate events, how the city can be better prepared for expected long-term impacts of climate change, and also how citizens can help the city combat climate change.

Participants and teams

200 attendees took part in Climathon 2022, participants formed 29 teams in total. The teams worked for 48 hours in the modern coworking space of the Hub-Hub. At the end of the weekend, 23 solutions were prepared, from which the expert jury awarded the best 3. Climathon participants had exclusive access to data from the IBL Software Engineering company, which they could use and thus ensure greater relevance of their solutions.

Winning solutions

The winning team Acropolis came up with an idea how to optimize and improve the city’s response to extreme weather fluctuations such as heavy rains or floods.

Second place was taken by a group of innovators called Dapper, who offered a solution to optimize road maintenance using critical infrastructure identification.

Third place went to the Drevokocúr team, which presented a solution to make public transport more efficient thanks to the identification of routes that people use most often.

Mentors

During the weekend, teams had at their disposal more than 30 mentors, with whom they consulted their progress and solutions. The mentors passed on valuable experience and knowledge to the participants in the areas of data analytics, transport, innovation, digital services, and climate and environment.

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Challenges

1. How can we make Bratislava and its citizens more resilient to extreme weather events?
2. How can we increase participation and engagement of residents in sustainable development of the city using digital tools such as Bratislava ID?
3. Open challenge: How can we as citizens help the city become more sustainable and combat climate change?

Mentors

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Challenges

Challenge 1

Data for people. How can we better communicate Bratislava research to people?

Metropolitan Institute Bratislava aims to raise awareness, build environmental responsibility, maximize the use of data and studies and present the research results to the public. We are looking for ideas that are based on data and digital technologies, which will help the city to improve the communication about research results in an attractive way. Ideas in this challenge should aim to help the city in the following areas:

1. Help the city raise environmental awareness and build environmental responsibility. Thanks to this solution the citizens of Bratislava will have a chance to be more engaged, educated and more motivated to undertake prevention measures to make Bratislava more resilient for climate change.
2. Help the city to make the data findings of Metropolitan Institute Bratislava more accessible to the public. Thanks to this solution, Bratislava citizens will have access to studies related to climate change, ecosystem status, temperature imaging, green space distribution and future development scenarios up to the year 2050.

When approaching this challenge, you should aim to present the already existing data and information from Metropolitan institute Bratislava. These results should be visually appealing, easily understood and in the future actively used by citizens.

Challenge 2

Second Chance. How can we give items a better second chance? 

The goal of KOLO – Bratislava’s Reuse Center is to give a second life to unnecessary but functional items. If these items are not chosen by the city’s residents, KOLO can provide them as material aid to various collaborating organizations. However, our most abundant item—books—remains a challenge for us. There are certainly places, organizations, or individuals who could make use of preserved books and other items that KOLO has on stock. KOLO needs a solution that provides a simple yet effective system for collaborating and transferring accumulated items to where they are needed, regardless of location or type of recipient. 

KOLO n.o. is looking for an efficient system to easily pass on items suitable for reuse. These items are abundant in KOLO but have less demand compared to others and tend to accumulate unnecessarily. 

The key challenges that the City of Bratislava needs to solve are: 

• How can we optimize the distribution of items? 
• How to identify recipients and their potential needs 
• How to use our data sources and digitalize the process of receiving the items 
• How to reuse books that nobody wants alternatively – recycling, upcycling, other reuse

Challenge 3

How can we use data to improve the city services? Placement of Container Stands, Water retention measures, Identification of available areas for planting.

The city of Bratislava aims to make data driven decisions. This principle, when possible, needs to be applied in every city department and organization. It is also the case, when the city needs to determine placement of container stands, water retention measures and identification of available areas for planting. These three specific areas were chosen for this years challenge. 

1. Placement of Container Stands 

The Municipality needs information about the suitable locations for container stands to improve and speed up the process of the leasing of land.

The leasing of land for container stands at SSN (section of property management) is being addressed. A request is received from a residential building, and subsequently, requests for container stands are sent to various city departments and the municipal district to express their agreement with the lease and the placement.  

The placement of containers on City property as part of a land lease application involves:  

• OLO 
• City districts 
• City of Bratislava departments: territorial development, transport section, informatics section, environment section, chief architect’s office, due to arrears also finance section  
• There is currently an effort to expedite the container stands process by setting a 30-day response period and attempting to gather requirements and KO criteria for placement from the individual departments.

2. Water retention measures 

Water Utility company, urban districts and their residents who are dealing with problems of flooding in certain areas need solution for the drainage of precipitation waters into the sewer system. These waters sometimes cause operational issues for the water utility company and contribute to the deterioration of the environmental, socio-urban environment.  

Water retention measures represent a “current” topic, so their elaboration in terms of utilizing possible and available information for potential measures is high. The main problem is finding suitable locations from the perspective of property-law settlement and addressing permitting and other administrative requirements. 

From the perspective of BVS (Bratislava Water Utility Company), efforts are currently underway to identify areas where there is excessive water inflow from surface runoff, and we are attempting to quantify these. Subsequently, it is necessary to propose possible solutions in cooperation with landowners and urban districts and prepare them for implementation. 

Correct determination of rainwater runoff pathways serves as the basis for the solution strategy. In this way, it is possible to identify both the necessary technical data regarding the retained amount of water, as well as any possible sources of problems within the questioned river basin. By subsequent evaluation of the environmental and geological data, it is possible to proceed to further steps necessary to find the correct solution. Here, synergistic effects associated with the mitigation of climate change must not be left out, as these include drought prevention activities and improvement of the water balance in the questioned area. 

3. Identification of available areas for planting 

Department of Maintenance and Greening, needs to find and identify suitable land for planting trees, because it needs to meet the planting objectives defined in the document Bratislava 2030, the current planting planning is limited by the city’s land and their knowledge. 

Currently we are facing the problem of identifying free areas where planting can be carried out. In some parts of the city, planting is only getting denser and the available areas for planting can no longer be found without considerable time commitment of the officers. 

The main objective of challenge is to get plots that are suitable for planting according to the conditions that are determined in advance. The main conditions are that the planting must be located on City property, meet STN X and Arboricultural Standard for Tree Planting AS X. The solution should be built to be able to respond to a change in input datasets such as geometry of existing trees, a property change, or a utility dataset update. Another part of the solution should include the ability to interactively work with predefined tree species that have their own specific planting conditions (e.g., different spacing).   

A major issue in green space management is the removal of older existing trees in emergency situations and repairs of utilities that are replaced by planting. A suitable addition to the solution would be a “threat warning system” for exiting trees that grow in the protection zone of utility networks in the sense of the STN of utility networks. In this way, we would be able to identify in advance places that will be vacated in the future and will need to be planted in a different location than in the utility protection zone.