Influential accountancy giant, Ernst & Young, believes Urban Digital Twins are the key to unleashing the potential power of the Metaverse in real world applications for the built environment, including energy transition and decarbonisation.
This verdict was delivered in an Ernst & Young (EY) report series on the Metaverse, which quotes Urban Digital Twin pioneer, Cityzenith CEO and Founder Michael Jansen.
“As the nexus of IoT, 3-D visualisation, open data, and mobile data, Urban Digital Twins are the only real-world Metaverse here today,” argues Jansen.
“Eliminating emissions in the built environment requires the integration of different types of tools to simulate ‘if-then’ scenarios.
“Because Urban Digital Twins are good at dealing with data variety, visualisation at scale and multisystem simulation, they’re perfect for this kind of challenge.”
In the future, Jansen says we’re likely to see urban systems of building Digital Twins connected to area or city-wide twins, giving city managers deep insights into the metabolism of the city and new opportunities for broad sustainability gains.
Ernst &Young, which uses the strapline ‘Building a better working world’, echoed this in the same Metaverse report: “Perhaps the biggest sustainability opportunity – and imperative – for Digital Twins is in cities, where 70% of global carbon emissions occur.
“Building operations – heating, cooling, lighting, and the like – alone contribute 28% of (those) global emissions. Global building floor area is expected to double by 2060, the equivalent of adding an entire New York City to world’s building stock every month, for 40 years.”
And this complemented a recent whitepaper by EY teams predicting that Digital Twins can cut a building’s carbon emissions by at least 50%, improve its operational and maintenance efficiency by 35%, boost human productivity by 20%, and improve space utilization by 15%.
As one of the world’s Big Four accountancy firms, and head of a global professional services network, EY is well placed to promote Digital Twins and help the Metaverse shape the future.
John de Yonge, EY Director for Global Insights and co-author of the EY Metaverse series, recently joined with Cityzenith CEO Michael Jansen on the webinar ‘Urban Digital Twins set to create the first real world Metaverse for the decarbonisation of buildings’ where they expounded and answered questions on the potential of the technologies.
And the EY reports contain the following call to action: “Business leaders must engage now to ensure the Metaverse develops in a way that is sustainable for planet and people, before exponential growth occurs.
“New dimensions of sustainability are opening both significant challenges to global climate objectives and new opportunities for achieving them. Digital Twins will help us optimize the physical world, from the planet to individual humans.
“As businesses invest, develop new customer strategies, and transform to pursue the potential of the Metaverse, better sustainability outcomes should be integral to the future vision and planning.”
Cityzenith’s Michael Jansen commented: “It is so inspirational to see a major power in the commercial world like Ernst & Young looking at the long-term benefits of pivotal technologies like the Metaverse and Urban Digital Twins, and notably how they can deliver real savings for building asset owners and organisations linked to global energy transition.”
