Equitable Digital Neighborhood Twin

Intensified extreme weather events pose a series of interrelated challenges to the countryĺs most densely populated places: its urban areas. The vulnerability of urban systems multiplies when the effects of climate change interact with pre-existing urban stressors, such as deteriorating infrastructure, areas of intense poverty, and high population density. Thus, it is imperative to understand urban systems (buildings, transportation, power and water supply, communication, and humans) and their two-way interactions with the climate/weather system, and to develop innovative solutions to equitably prepare cities for this unpredictable future. The Equitable Digital Neighborhood Twin (E-DNT) project will develop an equitable, community- centric digital twin for simulating and visualizing the physical, social, and economic behaviors within urban regions. Based on the responsible innovation framework, the E-DNT project draws upon three key interconnected approaches of 1) Engagement and Trust Building; 2) Discovery and Implementation; and 3) Evaluation and Re-imagination to measure and forecast impacts and advance energy equity in processes of decarbonization transitions at both individual and community scales. The E-DNT empowers decision-makers and community stakeholders by providing a comprehensive understanding of energy disparities and guiding strategic efforts aimed at reducing disparities and enhancing overall well-being in urban areas. In Phase I, the project team will work together to deliver a proof of concept (PoC) of E-DNT in a city in New York, as the testbed. The team will further engage with project supporters and community stakeholders throughout the Phase I to prime the design, codification, and implementation of E-DNT. The team will identify one neighborhood in the city and assess the energy burden disparities within that neighborhood. The E-DNT will be designed and developed in a manner to ensure scalability and interoperability, allowing communities across the nation to adopt the E-DNT. The proposed E-DNT provides an innovative tool to enable the equitable rollout of decarbonization technologies in a systematic, equitable, and sustainable way. The E-DNT is an all-in-one solution to simulate and visualize the physical, social, and economic behaviors within urban environments, capturing real-time neighborhood interactions with built-in equity measurements and metrics that assess equity at both individual and community scales. The E- DNT features equity, privacy, and interoperability that primes the solution to be easily configurable and adoptable by urban systems across the nation. In the US, approximately 43% of households are underserved and LMI communities, amounting to approximately 120 million people. Broader adoption of clean energy and energy efficiency technologies, particularly in disadvantaged communities, allows us as a nation to become closer to the goal of becoming carbon pollution free by 2035 and to build an equitable and sustainable world. Therefore, there are significant commercial applications and market potential for our equitable digital neighborhood twin solution.