Adaptation10: Urban Resilience

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Cities are hotbeds of climate risk. Their dense concentrations of buildings, infrastructure, and people amplify the impacts of extreme weather events, whether they be sweltering heatwaves or rain-charged storms.

The composition of urban habitats also means climate shocks are likely to cascade through the complicated networks of systems that define them — with often devastating consequences. Cities, for instance, experience the Urban Heat Island effect: they run hotter than surrounding rural areas because concrete, asphalt, and other built surfaces absorb and re-radiate heat. That added heat stress pushes up demand for air conditioning, putting extra pressure on power grids during heatwaves. The strain increases the risk of blackouts, which in turn leave residents without cooling just when they need it most, compounding the health dangers of extreme heat.

While climate risks may be more acute in cities, it is also true that their vast stocks of physical assets — and sheer weight of humanity — makes protecting urban environments a top priority of governments, businesses, and investors alike.

This is also what makes them such energetic laboratories of adaptation action. Cities are rich in capital and labor, meaning they are able to mobilize resources and deploy cutting-edge technologies at scale to defend their inhabitants and assets. Some conurbations even have their own dedicated climate solution accelerators, like New York’s BATWorks and London’s GreenCity.

💡Every month, Climate Proof partners with DSR & Partners, a boutique climate adaptation advisory, to compile the Adaptation10 series. The aim is to equip adaptation investors, innovators, and solutions buyers with an understanding of the adaptech landscape — and how various technologies can be leveraged in combination to address specific climate hazards in specific contexts. Learn more about DSR & Partners HERE

Still, the huge amount of people and property that require protection exceeds current levels of public and private investment. Last year, CDP — an environmental data platform — reported that 124 US cities sought US$62.7bn in 2024 for climate-resilient infrastructure, against available financing of just US$22bn. This left a US$40.8bn funding gap. That’s an amount greater than the GDP of Cyprus.

However, where there is need, there is also opportunity. A herd of start-ups, alongside more established companies, are iterating goods and services that address city-level climate risks and foster urban resilience. Many of these are selling directly to municipal governments, which are under pressure to maintain public transit services and infrastructure with tight budgets.

However, there are plenty of urban resilience innovations that have cross-over appeal to private interests, too. Some investors are betting precisely at this junction between public need and commercial opportunity. One is Streetlife Ventures, a US-based investment firm backing start-ups across five urban sectors: mobility and logistics; buildings; water and waste; energy, and adaptation. “We invest in things that solve for urban climate challenges, but sell to other businesses,” said Laura Fox, Managing Partner at the firm, during a recent webinar on urban resilience. “We see businesses as being a bit faster to adopt those solutions from early-stage technology companies.”

She added there are three flavors of adaptech her firm is obsessed over: platforms that integrate with businesses and local governments to enhance data and analytics; physical and natural interventions that change “the physicality of the built environment”, and finance and insurance solutions capable of unlocking the capital necessary for hardening urban environments against ever-worsening shocks.

“All three of those we think are incredibly investable and incredibly important to change the structural dynamic of what’s going to happen to our neighborhoods and communities,” said Fox.

Source: y Ikhlas Al Fahi / Pexels

Still, one challenge when it comes to adapting urban areas is that every city is different. While many face similar risks — public health emergencies from extended periods of extreme heat, sewer overflow and infrastructure degradation from torrential rain, and so on — they each have their own unique geographies and political contexts to contend with. Moreover, every municipal government communicates their adaptation needs in different, and often hard-to-track ways, via requests for proposal from multiple agencies (not all of which talk to one another) and budget earmarks spread across hundreds if not thousands of documents.

This makes it difficult for adaptation innovators to know which solutions would be welcomed in each city — and which have the potential to scale across urban contexts.

To address this problem, a team at Cornell Tech — the research center of the New York-based university — recently spun up Resilience Scanner. The interactive database ranks the climate risks facing more than 100 cities, along with the adaptation solutions already in place to reduce those risks and manage their impacts.

What could make this app particularly useful to technologists (and their investors) is its ability to map proven adaptation solutions from one city to other metros where they could make a difference. For example, Resilience Scanner claims that Paris’ EXTREMA heat alert mobile application could be ported over to Managua (in Nicaragua) and Delhi (in India), because of similarities in these cities’ risk profiles, population scales, and heatwave frequency.

This kind of intelligence could speed up the adoption of adaptech across cities, and allow savvy solution providers to scale. That would be especially valuable for companies selling to municipalities, where long sales cycles and drawn-out implementation timelines often slow growth.

In this edition of Adaptation10, we showcase a host of adaptech companies — some brand new, others more established — that are poised to benefit from the growing urban resilience imperative and from emerging tools like Resilience Scanner.

They include:

Intelligent water management systems for reducing the flood vulnerability of buildings and neighborhoods.
Urban heat and environmental intelligence platforms for instructing city managers on emerging risk hotspots.
High-resolution spatial and climate risk analytics for resilience planning
Real-time emergency response and coordination technologies

Together, solutions like these can strengthen resilience and help cities better withstand the shocks that come with a hotter climate.

We hope you find this selection useful.

Company Profiles

Adaptation10 company profiles are compiled by DSR & Partners and reviewed by Climate Proof. Company funding and FTE data are extracted from public sources. Neither Climate Proof nor DSR & Partners have received any form of compensation, monetary or otherwise, from any of the companies included in this edition.

RainGrid develops intelligent circular rain technology platforms which improve monitoring, maintenance, and record keeping — aiding cities with their transition away from conventional linear stormwater infrastructure. The company’s Intelligent Retention & Reuse/Recharge System (IR3) consists of a cloud-based SaaS that monitors precipitation and rooftop runoff in real time, and communicates this to sensor-managed storage solutions that optimize the use of excess rain. The system significantly reduces flood risks and supports positive ecosystem outcomes.

Ecopia AI uses artificial intelligence to build a ‘digital twin’ of the world, giving users access to reliable, high-resolution digital maps for making adaptation decisions. By leveraging data from a global network of imaging partners, the company is able to extract detailed representations of buildings, transportation networks, vegetation, and infrastructure. These representations can then be deployed by city governments to improve public transportation and enhance stormwater planning, among other projects. The company’s maps and data are also used by civil engineers to improve project efficiency and by insurance companies to gauge property risks.

IBS Technics designs and supplies flood-defense barriers for safeguarding buildings and infrastructure during high-water events. Its products include mobile flood barriers for rapid deployment, slide-gate systems and stop log closures for buildings, and permanent flood walls for long-term protection. The systems are engineered for durability, reliability, and rapid deployment under emergency conditions. The company’s solutions have supported municipalities, businesses, and property owners in the UK, US, Hungary, and Thailand, to name a few.

FortyGuard delivers hyper-local urban heat insights for governments and businesses. The company collects more than 50 billion data points each day to inform its suite of real-time heat information and heat forecasts, which are leveraged by urban resilience teams to decide which cooling interventions might be necessary — and when they should be deployed. Its analytical capabilities further equip decision-makers with data on how urban design, building materials, and surface treatments influence heat accumulation.

DeepRoot develops green infrastructure systems designed to support urban tree growth and manage stormwater in dense, built environments. Its Silva Cell structures sit beneath paved surfaces and are filled with lightly compacted soil, creating the conditions large trees need to thrive while also delivering a nature-based stormwater solution. Installed in streetscapes, plazas, and other public spaces around the world, DeepRoot’s structures serve as dual-function infrastructure. By enabling larger, healthier trees, they help reduce urban heat through expanded canopy cover, too.

Sonic Fire Tech is pioneering an acoustic fire suppression technology for homeowners and builders. Unlike conventional systems that rely primarily on water or chemical agents, the company’s devices emit low-frequency sound waves designed to disrupt combustion processes and prevent fires from proliferating through a structure. The technology is engineered to provide supplementary fire protection in residential, commercial, and infrastructure contexts.

Breeze Technologies offers cutting-edge air quality monitoring and environmental information via its proprietary sensors and AI-enhanced analytics. The company develops compact, high-precision sensor hardware that captures real-time pollutant concentrations and atmospheric conditions for decision-makers in urban environments and commercial properties. This data is then processed through Breeze’s platform to generate structured, actionable insights. The system helps city managers, industrial operators, and building owners flag pollution sources and make informed decisions to improve their local environments.

Class 3 Technologies, a spin-out from engineering consultancy Arup, develops climate risk and resilience software tailored to the built environment. Its Iris platform provides engineering-grade climate risk assessments for buildings down to the component level, offering a fine-grained understanding of their vulnerability to floods, storms, and other climate-driven disasters. The data can be harnessed by building owners and investors to address weak points and test adaptation strategies under multiple future climate scenarios.

Perimeter is a public safety platform designed to support emergency managers and local government agencies amidst climate-related disasters. In the event of a catastrophe, the company’s systems centralize operational data, incident updates, and communication streams into a unified interface that can be shared across agencies, so that all responders are acting on the same reliable, up-to-the-minute data. The platform also facilitates public messaging, so affected populations receive potentially life-saving information on when and how to evacuate a disaster zone. Perimeter further supports preparedness planning and recovery management, helping build resilience before and after catastrophic events.

Sparrow captures street-level environmental intelligence using mobile sensor networks mounted on cars, buses, and other vehicles. These fleets record high-resolution data on air quality, road-surface conditions, and other environmental factors of interest to urban planners. This sensor data is transmitted to cloud-based systems and made available to clients via APIs and analytical dashboards. The company has successfully deployed its devices in the US, Switzerland, and Germany, among other countries.

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Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall & Daniel Schmitz-Remberg

Adaptation10: Urban Resilience

Company Profiles

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