Innovation

Dr Laven Naidoo, head of the Urban Data Science team at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO)

Carbon is invisible, but in Johannesburg, it now comes in shades of green, teal, brown and black. For Dr Laven Naidoo, head of the Urban Data Science team at the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), these colours are the key to building the city’s first carbon atlas, a way of showing where carbon is stored, emitted and what that means for the city’s, hopefully, climate-resilient future. “Not all carbon is the same.

There are good and bad forms and if we can classify them, we can plan for them,” he says. Naidoo’s work is ambitious: creating the first carbon atlas for Gauteng. The project uses satellite data, ground surveys and machine learning to measure carbon across the landscape, identifying where it is stored (sinks) and where it is emitted (sources). And with cities like Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni all committing to carbon neutrality by 2050, this is the first attempt to quantify what neutrality would really take.