Resilience clusters

Over the next decade, we'll see the emergence of resilience clusters - concentrated ecosystems of innovation focused on urban climate adaptation - catalyzing through strategic investments and initiatives. Early investments by government agencies will be crucial in seeding these new nodes of innovation. National research agencies will expand high-risk, high-reward funding for technology and engineering research aimed at increasing infrastructure resilience. Meanwhile, LLMs will be used to scour patent data, linking up disparate ideas to identify new opportunities for innovation, and accelerating interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge synthesis within these clusters. The impact of these clusters will be amplified by the nature of climate-related AI innovations, which tend to generate more subsequent inventions and have broader cross-sector influence. All of these developments will help reduce risk for private investors seeking opportunities in adaptation tech, further driving resilience clusters' growth.

As these innovation hubs mature, they'll establish ever more elaborate and useful testbeds for proving out urban resilience innovations powered by AI. These "living labs" will provide cities with opportunities to structure and incentivize investments and test regulatory approaches for adaptation AI that align these innovations with community values and policy goals.