AI-Powered Social Innovation To Build More Resilient Cities

Over the next three decades, our world is projected to continue to urbanize. In fact, the share of people living in urban areas will increase from 56 percent (2021) to 68 percent by 2050, according to UN Habitat. While urbanization poses a range of challenges for city governments, services, and communities to overcome, the growth of urban populations and urban areas also reveals an opportune moment to accelerate social innovation and uplift urban economies.

Tailored tech solutions, offering highly curated insights, can be leveraged to help deploy the right resources in the right places. That’s a call to action that the power of AI and data can help us catalyze.

At the beginning of 2024, and in alignment with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, IBM launched a request for proposals (RFP) for projects that aim to make cities safer, more resilient and more sustainable. Today, out of more than 100 applications, five new organizations have been selected to join the IBM Sustainability Accelerator and collaborate with IBM experts on AI solutions to address key challenges for — and with — the communities they support. Participants were selected for their significant level of support to the communities they serve, as well as the innovative ways each organization plans to leverage AI technology to build more resilient cities.

• C40 Cities: IBM and C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities, will work together to create a data-driven, AI-powered solution to help cities analyze potential risks that may arise as a result of extreme heat and the urban heat island effect. These can include stressed energy resources, increases in mortality rates, and socioeconomic disparities. The new solution will aim to enable cities to create adaptation strategies to help alleviate population health risks and economic burdens, while strengthening national resilience efforts. The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and the Group on Earth Observations will also support this project.
• U.N. World Food Programme: Through an agreement with World Food Program USA, IBM will collaborate with the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), the world's largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, to enhance WFP’s “GeoTar” geospatial tool with advanced AI and data capabilities. GeoTar creates vulnerability maps, helping improve operational decisions like targeting and prioritization. The new features will support WFP Country Offices that are engaged in combatting global hunger and improving food security, which can be disrupted by environmental disasters, such as droughts, floods and landslides.
• Mass General Brigham: IBM and Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit integrated academic healthcare system, will work together to develop an AI tool for healthcare systems and community health centers confronting extreme heat. The tool will be built to help predict hyperlocal extreme heat events, identify at-risk patients, and deliver reliable, automated warnings when a heat wave is imminent. The new solution will inform patients of resources available to them, while helping clinicians to take preventative action by screening for, and intervening upon, patient risk factors. The solution will be initially tested across Mass General Brigham hospitals. The tool will be designed with security features to protect the patient information and health information used to support the solution and to provide access to such information only within each health system using the tool and its patients.
• Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy: IBM and the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a nonprofit organization working with citizens and governments on technology, urban governance, and public policy projects, will collaborate to build a city data and analytics platform. By consolidating city-level data, the platform will be designed to enable data-based decision making for informed interventions by governments in India that aim to improve quality of life for urban populations, such as by improving service delivery and fostering sustainable urban development. By spatializing data and including environmental and socioeconomic data, the platform will aim to strengthen place-based governance. By standardizing data, the platform will also support data transparency and interoperability, as well as solution adoption.
• Kota Kita: IBM and Kota Kita, a non-profit organization that promotes sustainable, socially just, equitable, and democratic cities, will work together to develop new AI models to identify and respond to the needs of Samarinda (Indonesia) citizens who are exposed to climate stress. The models will be designed to consider physical vulnerabilities, such as natural disasters, and economic and social variables, such as demographic growth and access to clean water. The new models will aim to catalyze the development of resilience-building initiatives and ultimately allow the implementation of new projects to help reduce the vulnerabilities of local communities.

The IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a social innovation program that applies IBM technologies, such as hybrid cloud and AI, and an ecosystem of experts to enhance and scale non-profit and government organization initiatives, accelerating economic impact. Projects are executed in two phases, starting with the IBM Garage, IBM’s proven methodology for accelerating digital transformation and delivering meaningful, measurable, outcomes. Next, during the Development and Implementation phase, IBM experts will configure IBM resources and technology to help participants meet their goals.

As part of this IBM Sustainability Accelerator cohort, EY teams will provide general capacity building workshops and coaching to the resilient city cohort, supporting these innovative organizations on their mission to make cities more sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

To date, 20 organizations have been part of the IBM Sustainability Accelerator, and we have committed $45M until 2030 to support vulnerable populations around the world. As of last year, IBM has supported approximately 65,300 direct beneficiaries through our sustainable agriculture cohort, with approximately 1.1 million more projected to benefit from our clean energy cohort. And, we expect these resilient cities projects will benefit thousands of citizens across the world.

By harnessing the potential of AI, IBM believes in empowering people and organizations to take on some of the biggest challenges our cities face today. Together, we can build more prosperous environments where people and economies can thrive.

Interested in applying to the new RFP focused on AI for Sustainable Consumption and Production? Apply before April 30^th, 2025: https://www.ibm.com/campaign/2025/sustainability-accelerator-rfp

About the IBM Sustainability Accelerator

Launched in 2022, the IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a social innovation program that supports communities facing environmental and economic stress around the world, through technologies like AI and an ecosystem of experts. Each year, the program selects five new projects to develop and scale technology and AI solutions addressing topics like sustainable agriculture, clean energy, water management, resilient cities or sustainable consumption and production. For more information: https://www.ibm.com/impact/initiatives/ibm-sustainability-accelerator