West Sydney Curbs Heat with Smart Irrigation

After experiencing a technical problem that left Sydney’s Bicentennial Park without irrigation for two weeks during the 2019-2020 Christmas holidays, leaving the park in poor conditions, its managers decided to turn to smart irrigation. But, smart irrigation with a twist that would help them tackle not only water use, but also urban heat islands, an issue that continues to increase as more and more green areas are destroyed in favour of urbanization. That’s when the Simpact project was developed to automatically schedule adapted irrigation thanks to data, a digital twin and AI, giving the park the tools to irrigate in a way that cools the environment while using water responsibly.

In this video, we interview Sebastian Pfautsch, Simpact Project Director and Associate Professor in Urban Studies at Western Sydney University, and Christian Urich, Senior Integrated Urban Water Modelling and Data Engineer at Hydrology and Risk Consulting (HARC), to discuss the project, the technology installed and used, what makes this project different as well as how it helps them tackle both water use and heat in the Bicentennial park.