The Local Infrastructure Hub held a Tech and Innovation Series webinar on April 30, 2025, which focused on the potential for innovative technology to bolster cities’ resilience planning efforts. Speakers included Chris Kennedy, Associate Director, Urban Systems Lab, The New School; Anna Kramer, ClimateIQ Product Director, Urban Systems Lab, The New School; Lian Plass, Vice Chair, American Planning Association Tech Division; and Susan Crawford, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. These experts discussed the practical steps and accessible tools that municipalities can use to withstand severe weather, improve emergency response, and protect property and lives.
The session highlighted a number of tools and resources that city resilience planners can draw on. These include:
- ClimateIQ: A new local hazard dashboard being developed by the Urban Systems Lab at The New School.
- Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation Assessment Tool: As a part of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, this map allows users to explore climate hazard projects and understand if people, property and infrastructure could be exposed.
- ClimRR Portal: Developed by Argonne National Lab, this portal uses a different modeling approach to provide localized climate hazard projections.
- Adaptation Clearinghouse: A catalogue compiled by the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University, detailing resources that can help policymakers at all levels of government reduce or avoid the impacts of climate change to communities in the United States.
- Geosnap Python Data Science Library: A mapping tool which can streamline many tasks for neighborhood demographic analysis.
Invited guests included urban climate hazard researchers and resilience planning practitioners. Key insights from the discussion included:
Help shape a new generation of climate hazard tools.
“Climate modeling takes a lot of expertise and time, and most cities don’t have the resources to keep a climate modeler on full-time,” noted Chris Kennedy, Associate Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School. Kennedy provided an overview of the Google-funded ClimateIQ project, a “free open access tool to provide free climate hazard information to communities” around the world. Anna Kramer, ClimateIQ’s Product Director, provided a short demo highlighting the tool’s hazard mapping capabilities. “Our goal is to democratize understanding of hazard information so communities can understand their exposure to these hazards,” Kramer said. The ClimateIQ team is soliciting feedback from cities via an online survey about desired features the new tool can provide.
Be ready to pivot when data sources dry up.
Lian Plass, Vice Chair of the American Planning Association’s Tech Division, noted that some of the federal data sources and tools highlighted in her 2023 Planning magazine article, “5 Climate Tech Tools to Build Community Resilience”, are no longer available. Advising cities to consider filling climate data gaps with citizen science, Plass advises cities to “go to your community. You may find the data you can obtain in this way is even better than what you were using before.” Plass also noted that emerging AI applications offer opportunities for highly-targeted, personalized, and conversational risk communication that can help people more effectively understand the hazards they face.
Document your successes.
While acknowledging the effort involved, Nayeli Rodriguez, Deputy Director of the Office of Climate Resilience for the City of Boston, called upon cities to do a better job of documenting successful resilience projects. “Others need this information” to advance their own resilience efforts, she highlighted. Looking to the future, Rodriguez highlighted anticipated technology advances in materials as game-changers for local efforts to reduce urban heat islands and accelerate construction of coastal barriers. “The city does so much purchasing of materials that we are in a real position to accelerate innovation,” she noted.
About the Tech and Innovation Series
The Tech and Innovation Series is dedicated to helping local leaders navigate and understand the large quantities of information from the federal government on the nearly 400 funding opportunities available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The 2 year series is focused on how cities can leverage technology to improve their federal infrastructure funding proposals during 2023, 2024, and 2025. Programs focus on helping cities improve their proposals in response to Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFO’s) by adopting state-of-art technologies, expanding their technology capacity, and integrating aspirational technology “moonshots” for their cities.
The Series is produced by the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech and U.S. Digital Response (USDR) as part of the Local Infrastructure Hub, a partnership of the US Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, Results for America and Delivery Associates supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ballmer Group, Emerson Collective, Ford Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation.