About Resilience Scanner
Urban climate adaptation is an enormous challenge. But it is also a huge opportunity for transformation through innovation. For cities, the ROI on adaptation solutions is enormous——yielding more than $10 in benefits for every $1 spent. This is why the World Economic Forum estimates global demand for climate adaptation solutions could reach $2 trillion annually by 2026.
Yet a climate adaptation funding gap of more than $359 billion per year means many innovative solutions are overlooked. And promising new technologies that could accelerate and amplify their impacts are left behind.
Raising the Visibility of Urban Adaptation Technologies
We believe a fundamental barrier blocking progress is a lack of visibility about how technology can enhance urban climate adaptation solutions.
Information on solutions and technologies for urban climate adaptation remains fragmented across countless municipal documents and websites. As a result, there is a disconnect between adaptation technology providers (supply) and urban centers seeking solutions (demand). Investors hesitate to commit capital when data on project risk and returns remain unclear.
To address this gap, we are making climate adaptation technology solutions visibile and actionable at a global scale. Our goal is facilitate knowledge sharing between regions facing similar challenges, and demonstrate investible opportunities for philanthropic and commercial innovators.
The Role of Deep Research
Resilience Scanner documents adaptation technologies at work in more than 100 global cities. Drawing initially on resilience plans published over the last 15 years, our AI first extracts mentions of technology-enabled solutions and then conducts research to prepare a fact-based, documented case study. These case studies show in up-to-date detail how past proposed actions have been engineered, financed, operated and their impacts.
This “deep research” process exploits recent, rapid innovations in artificial intelligence—namely, autonomous agents that can plan searches, scrape documents from the web, extract factual claims, and synthesis a narrative to fulfill the goals set forth in our instructions. See the Methods page for more information.
Team
The Resilience Scanner is developed by the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute in partnership with Marceta AI. The Urban Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is a leading applied research center advancing technology for cities. Marceta AI is a climate-tech venture builder and AI innovation studio focused on accelerating resilient infrastructure.
- Dr. Anthony Townsend, Senior Research Associate, Cornell Tech — Principal Investigator
- Jonathan Weitz, Marceta AI - Contributor and strategic advisor
- Vianney Brandicourt, Urban Tech Fellow, Cornell Tech - User and market research
- Ben Oldenburg, Oldenburg Design - Cartographic design
Students
Cornell Tech graduate students are an essential part of the research and engineering team for this project. Contributors include:
- Amit Shanbhoug - Agent engineering
- Sean Hardesty Lewis - Agent engineering
- Atmika Pai - Data curation
- Yixuan Wang - Plan research, Data curation
- Leihao Fang - Plan research, Data curation
- Andrew Park - Front end design
Sponsors
Ongoing research is supported by the 2030 Project: A Cornell Climate Initiative and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
