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?

1. Challenge

How can we make Bratislava and its citizens more resilient to extreme weather events?

Bratislava is looking for innovative ideas that strengthen its resilience to extreme weather events. We are looking for ideas that are based on data and digital technologies, which will help the city to decrease the negative impacts of extreme weather events on citizens and infrastructure. Ideas in this challenge should aim to help the city in the following areas:

1. Help the city with new modelling tools or resources to prepare reactions before the events even occur. Thanks to your ideas and solutions, the City of Bratislava will be able to create reaction and action plans based on simulations of events.
2. Help the city to engage, protect and educate the citizens. Thanks to your solutions, the City of Bratislava will be able to increase public awareness about the potential risks, mitigation plans and properly engage them in responses to these events.

When approaching this challenge, you should aim to make the most relevant data and information available in a form that can be easily understood and used by the beneficiaries, (e. g. crisis management, dispatching, road management and maintenance or citizens).

2. Challenge

How can we increase participation and engagement of residents in sustainable development of the city using digital tools such as Bratislava ID?

Bratislava has launched its brand-new city platform, Bratislava ID (Digital City Account) in April 2023. The idea is very simple – after creating an account, citizens can access city services faster and easier. The vision is to extend it and to have all the digital services of city organisations and city boroughs at one place.

Currently, the platform is in its early stages. Users can pay their property tax or buy tickets for the swimming pool. The main goal is to make the user experience with city services faster and more convenient. In the future, the platform can also provide a space for networking, getting in touch with city representatives or for generating ideas on how to make our city a better place to live. Data from the trustworthy online interactions with citizens via such platform could be used by city representatives for data-driven decision-making.

At the same time, Bratislava ID interactions could be linked to a physical face-to-face meetings (e.g. participatory meetings), thus creating an omnichannel experience for the citizens.

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

• How can the city motivate and involve citizens in driving climate-neutral changes and sustainable behaviour?
• How can we improve Bratislava ID to serve the sustainable development goals of the city?
• How can we inspire, motivate and support the citizens to make low-carbon and environmentally conscious choices?
• How might we create a Bratislava Citizen Climate Board by direct digital integration into Bratislava ID?

3. Challenge

Open challenge – How can we as citizens help the city become more sustainable and combat climate change?

In order to make a meaningful and measurable impact, as many people as possible need to make the right choices as often as possible. From this perspective, the main objective of this challenge is for

you to suggest how to motivate and support the citizens in more sustainable ways of life. You can use any of the available resources and mentors for other challenges.

When tackling this challenge, you are invited to combine resources available from the other challenges and include your own ideas or resources to create meaningful ideas that will help the City of Bratislava to achieve sustainable development. Your ideas should be aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals of the City and validated with the relevant mentors

We are looking for ideas that will enabling climate-neutral behaviour of citizens or communities in specific areas of interest:

• Energy saving
• Water consumption
• Better waste management
• Sharing mobility
• Sharing economy
• Community services

Mentors