Resilience drives growth of urban digital twins

The number of cities developing digital twins is growing rapidly. According to ABI Research, more than 500 cities are expected to be using the technology by 2025. Climate resilience is a major driver of adoption. According to the World Economic Forum, cities such as Amsterdam, Singapore, Houston, Tokyo and Copenhagen have used digital twins in efforts to mitigate climate-related flooding and heat. However, digital twins are still largely confined to monitoring and control. Only a handful of cities are pursuing more sophisticated architectures for digital twins that centralize data to support broader cross-sector modeling and simulation.

The ongoing spread of digital twins can deliver new and enhanced capabilities for cities to understand climate hazards and vulnerabilities and plan steps to reduce risks. Furthermore, as the number of cities using digital twins grows, the expanding market will generate new use cases and create opportunities for technological innovation that all can benefit from. However, even as twins spread across the world, stakeholder collaboration and data governance challenges will require focused local effort to ensure the benefits within cities are shared.