Heat resilience isn't a tech problem. It's an access problem

Kurt Shickman, Principal, KS Advisory | Founding Executive Director, Global Cool Cities Alliance

Kurt Shickman: People are starting to see that heat affects their lives and economies. But how do we make accessible the tools that cities need to make smart decisions? How do we secure development finance from the development banks, insurers, private companies or investors? How to convince them to fund interventions at the scale needed to make a difference?

The main bottleneck now is giving cities access to financing and the tools they need to build real heat resilience.

Gavin Allen: What is the best way to address that funding challenge?

Kurt Shickman: We need to align our goals – making people safer, improving their ability to thrive in a changing climate – with how funding entities assess value for themselves. Their risk tolerance is different and they are often using different ways to measure success than cities are. The economic benefits of heat resilience are real, but we have to demonstrate and interpret that value for a broader set of market actors. The core goal is improving human lives, but we must be able to articulate our goals in language that makes sense to those organizations.

Gavin Allen: What are the main barriers that prevent cities from adopting heat mitigation technology?

Kurt Shickman: Reasonably low-tech solutions are underpinned by an increasingly technically adept marketplace. The main challenge is to make those tools more accessible. A city with the resources and strong political support for heat action, like Singapore, can use a digital twin twin to test all manner of different interventions to across different variables, and that’s great.

But accessibility doesn't just mean having a tool. Cities also need data that doesn't cost them an arm and a leg — the whole spear and not just the tip, because only with access to accurate data can leaders make informed decisions. AI has made existing data sets more usable, and that’s exciting. We’re seeing decision-support tools that can evaluate solutions like shade, nature-based solutions, and cool roofs, and the impact they’d have on human comfort at a building level. That data is available for any city in the world. That’s the type of innovation we need.

Gavin Allen: How do we ensure solutions don't become luxury add-ons for a narrow tranche of residents, and instead, make sure that data benefits those most vulnerable to heat risk?

Kurt Shickman: Data is agnostic: it can support whatever policy outcome cities want. The key is getting them to see the value of investing in the neighborhoods at the greatest heat risk. The “Freetown the Treetown” program in Sierra Leone uses technology not only to plant trees and create shade, but also to create jobs for the people who maintain the tree canopy. Technology makes it possible to target community engagement in ways that also boost local incomes.

Gavin Allen: How critical are real-time data flow and dense networks of IoT sensors?

Kurt Shickman: In addition to long-term interventions such as cool roofs and tree-planting, there’s also the real-time response side of heat resilience: how do we keep people safe during dangerous heat, making sure they’re aware of the risks and know what actions to take? That’s where IoT and high-resolution, real-time data become crucial.

Gavin Allen: Do you see a future where cities can predict and respond to heat risks, similar to early-warning hurricane systems?

Kurt Shickman: Absolutely. Many parts of the world still lack any kind of warning system, but technology is rapidly filling those gaps. We’re now able to send heat alerts to the most at-risk communities with much greater precision. Technology can link local weather conditions with expected health outcomes such as increased mortality, or spikes in emergency room visits. When you can say, “At 32°C, this city historically sees a 5–7% rise in all-cause deaths,” it becomes a powerful way to communicate risk and prompt action.

We’re also seeing the emergence of agentic AI. One company I advise has built a medically informed AI agent that texts or calls residents in highly vulnerable neighborhoods before a heatwave, engaging them in a conversation about how to stay safe. For example, it might ask whether they have air conditioning, or a fan, and know when to use it. It’s essentially a call center on steroids. We piloted it with about 10,000 people in New York City this summer, and early results suggest it reduced emergency-sector demand.

Gavin Allen: High-tech but human?

Kurt Shickman: Exactly. Some people are wary at first – they know the AI agent is not a real person – but the AI asks the right questions and guides the conversation. You can hear people relax. The next phase involves evaluating other environmental risks and eventually going beyond health, to intelligently connect different services with people who need them. That kind of targeted engagement will be a game-changer. Agentic AI can potentially reach millions of people who couldn't be reached any other way. That will reduce expensive visits to the emergency room, and might even prevent deaths. Eric Klinenberg’s book, Heat Wave, about the Chicago heat wave in the mid-90s, found that socially connected communities – those where people lived in multi-generation households or had someone to call – suffered less than disconnected ones, even at the same income level. Technology helps simulate that social connection.

Gavin Allen: Can cloud-based urban data platforms provide a joined-up backbone that lets planners, climate scientists, and private and public health partners collaborate on heat reduction strategies?

Kurt Shickman: That will be – and, in some cases, already is – an important tool. But there is no Department of Heat. There are scores of agencies at state, regional, and municipal levels. You've got folks from parks, health departments, sustainability offices, public safety, public works, transportation, and groups in risk-exposed communities. They all see value in engaging with heat resilience, but they do it through their own programs and funding. Any tool to improve collaboration would be invaluable. And there is a great desire to connect across the bureaucracies, from tree-planting to cool-roof installation, because it would also allow us to tell the full story. We often see these heat investments through one narrow lens, and fail to articulate the breadth of their value.

Gavin Allen: Should there be a Department of Heat?

Kurt Shickman: There's real value in having a Chief Heat Officer who raises awareness of an important issue. But there has to be a budget, a mandate, and power associated with that. That’s not always the case. Better to think about this as a kind of inter-agency heat response council: people from different spaces, with their respective budgets and political buy-in, working together towards a common goal, but not divorced from their specific agencies.

Gavin Allen: You mentioned Singapore’s digital twin initiative. How could more widespread use of digital twins accelerate the design of cooler urban environments?

Kurt Shickman: That’s the gold standard you’d ideally like to get to. A digital twin allows you to cohesively assess impacts (positive and negative) across systems.

But it's not essential to have a full digital twin everywhere. There are perfectly adequate partial twins, or partial urban-scale modeling tools, that can guide the steps that need to be taken. Singapore has extraordinary technical capabilities that most cities can’t match. But cities don’t have to be at Singapore's level to take data-driven action.

Gavin Allen: Different cities, different stages, different goals?

Kurt Shickman: Exactly, and that's key. The challenge isn’t innovation, it’s access. We would see much more positive human outcomes if 80% of cities had a perfectly adequate tool versus 5% having top-of-the-line tools. The really exciting use of AI, data tools, and machine learning is in driving that access, not in making the best products even better.

Gavin Allen: What can tech companies do to broaden that access?

Kurt Shickman: They can take a more liberal view of what can be open, in terms of methods and data, and work with civil society and technical experts, the smaller actors, who are really innovating in this area. That's a huge opportunity. At hackathons, when you see what people are able to do with the data they have, it's absolutely incredible. New innovations, new ways to process data – that can benefit these tech companies and could be acknowledged in terms of funding, but also in providing more data access. The more your tools, data, and platforms are used, the stickier and more embedded they become, so that’s a bottom-line benefit to the companies, too.

Gavin Allen: The options are there; we’ve just got to keep going?

Kurt Shickman: It’s easy to slip into gloom and doom, especially when the economics are so stark. Heat already costs the average city 1.6% to 2% of GDP. In the US alone, it accounts for about $500 billion a year in lost productivity.

But doom doesn’t drive action; it breeds resignation. What we need is a focus on solutions—on what works, and for whom; and how communities, from Kampala to Guangzhou, are co-developing approaches that meaningfully reduce heat risks. Technology has a vital role to play in that shift.