Sustainability of life is possible only by increasing visibility of the threads that connect us to the world and to others.

The first time was at the cinema. I was 7 years old, it was 1977. It was the first time I felt the trepidation of an immersive experience. In addition to the excitement of the film – Star Wars – which marked an entire generation, I was also bewitched by the potential of the screen – that mysterious object that filled with light and dominated the dark, transporting us directly into our own dreams and fantasies.

One evening at the end of winter, many years later, coming out of the laboratory at the University of Bologna, on a hilltop, it happened again. Observing the city through a transparent air that electrified the first stars, I had the feeling that the pulsating lights of streets and buildings represented a living organism, a single electric system made up of constantly interacting people and things. That was when I decided to develop a model to describe environmental impact with the same precision used to study the stability of a bridge or an electrical circuit.

36 years after that Christmas, I created an international team to bring my vision to life: that is how we established QCumber, the application that makes it possible to view the pollution produced by whoever or whatever surrounds us, and to contribute, collectively, to improving the world.
I dedicate QCumber to those who, every day, have the extraordinary courage to believe that it is possible to improve our lives together on this planet.

Giuseppe Magro, CEO of QCumber

Vision: sustainability from the bottom

The Earth has reached the limits of its “capacity” – the threshold after which the ecosystem will lose its balance. In this undoubtedly alarming context, technology offers opportunities for a level of knowledge that was unimaginable until just a few short years ago. Thanks to these opportunities, we now know that a new paradigm of cohabitation is feasible. We have decided to accept it, in light of our personal view of social and environmental sustainability: sustainability from the bottom.

Values: 4 pillars

Therefore, here is the recipe to planetary sustainability, as we believe is possible: each stakeholder participates – thanks to the connectedness made possible by the Internet and by developing technologies – in a new path to sustainable development, based on the principles of transparency, sharing, collaboration and participation.

Mission: IoT for sustainability

We have set ourselves a mantra, which guides our actions towards this vision of a new and sustainable environment: IoT for sustainability.
With QCumber, we have added – to traditional approaches and sustainability software – the “Internet of Things”, that is to say the possibility of integrating – in the environmental impact assessment algorithms that animate our platform – data collected in the territory, over the Internet, in real time, and transparently.
This allows the stakeholders in a territory to deal with sustainability in a different way: no longer as a requirement or constraint, but instead as a strategic approach for the common good.

Giuseppe Magro is the Italian president of the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), CEO of the QCumber Start up and he works with the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Bologna (DIN).

Giuseppe has more than 15 years of international experience in developing environmental impact and risk models to support decisions, particularly in reference to strategic and operative choices to improve sustainability in businesses and in Public Administration.

Before founding QCumber in 2014, he provided consulting services for English and Irish national control agencies (EPA UK and IE EPA) and the Italian Government.

He created and commercializedthe patented DCGIS© Dynamic Computational GIS system, a suite of algorithms that use international environmental impact and risk standards for businesses and for Public Administration. Italy officially adopted DCGIS in 2010, and this tool makes it possible to calculate and assess environmental impacts, and support decisions for the improvement of sustainability conditions (Regione Lombardia, Umbria, Puglia, and various Italian cities).

Giuseppe then createdand launched, in Italy and the UK, QCumber, the first platform to support multi-stakeholder decisions, acknowledged by the British government (UKTI) as one of the 100 best ideas in the world at the 2012 Startup Games in London.

He was assigned by IAIA to direct the 35th international conferenceentitled “Impact Assessment in the Digital Era” and to support the transitional process for decision-makers and planners to using IOT and Machine Learning.

He recently published a book called “Open Data e Ambiente: una rivoluzione digitale per la sostenibilità” [Open Data and the Environment: a digital revolution for sustainability] (Ed. Ambiente, 2015).