Presented my ongoing PhD research at Climate AI Nordics 2026 Workshop in Denmark
Last week I was in Copenhagen for the 2nd Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate, organized by Climate AI Nordics, where I presented our upcoming Nature Cities paper (currently in press), both as an invited talk and a poster.
The starting point: climate risk is not spread evenly within a city. The neighborhoods most exposed to flooding or extreme heat are often dense, informally built and poorly connected, and they are frequently the ones missing from global data. That blind spot is widest in small and medium cities, which rarely feature in urban research.
Using open building, road and population data with a model trained on eight benchmark cities, we estimate that around 395 million people (20.2% of the urban population we covered across 5,132 cities in 103 countries) live in morphologically deprived neighborhoods. The finding that drew the most attention is: more than a third of them, roughly 136 million, live in small and medium cities rather than the megacities that dominate the debate.
A special thanks to Aleksis Pirinen for giving an oral slot for this topic alongside the poster, and to everyone who appreciated the work and engaged with me in discussions at the poster.
It was good to meet and participate in the workshop with my friend and a fellow Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente Alumni Venkanna Babu Guthula.
