Big data helps Guiyang become intelligent, green

Guiyang – capital city of Southwest China's Guizhou province – is reportedly applying big data in order to balance its economic development and environmental protection.

During the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), Guiyang's forest coverage rate increased to 55 percent, while its excellent and good air quality rate increased to 98.9 percent and the total number of parks in the city reached 1,025.

The high forest coverage is understood to make fire prevention critical to the city. Guiyang's fire department used to take about one hour to receive fire reports and dispatch firemen to the location.

Now, with the help of real-time monitoring, each mounted camera can cover about 20 square kilometers of area – and Guiyang has built an intelligent fire prevention command center to provide early warnings and locate the fire outbreak points immediately.

The center can reportedly locate and handle a fire situation in less than 30 minutes – with video data, personal assignment information, vehicle tracking and photos at the scene sent back as digital data to be archived.

In recent years, Guiyang's forest fire occurrence rate has been kept under 0.6 percent.

The latest technology is also helping the city to stay green and go even greener.

To restore the environment of the Nanming River, Guiyang monitored the drain outlets along the river through an online platform. At Guiyang's big data platform for rivers and lakes, the water quality data of all the rivers are recorded to provide information on water pollution, early warnings and any necessary remedial treatment.

In 2020, Guiyang started to install environment monitoring stations along Shubo Avenue. The installation of sensors for air pollution there has now been completed, with 13 online monitoring stations for noise pollution also in use and a remote sensing system for vehicle exhaust pollution in place.