Climate change is reshaping the conditions under which cities are planned, built and operated. More frequent and intense flooding, extreme heat, drought and storms are placing growing pressure on urban populations and on the infrastructure systems they depend on, while continued urbanisation increases exposure. Responding to these pressures requires cities to understand their own systems in far greater detail, and far more quickly, than conventional planning tools allow.
Cities have long depended on being legible — to planners, engineers and citizens. Increasingly they also need to be legible to machines: captured in data, represented in digital models, and analysed by computational systems that can anticipate risk and support response. Urban digital twins are the principal means by which this is being attempted. By integrating data from remote sensing, sensor networks, infrastructure records and other sources with models of urban form and function, they offer new possibilities for monitoring, simulating and planning cities under a changing climate.
Yet research in this area remains fragmented. Work on urban digital twins is often organised around platforms and technologies, while work on climate adaptation is organised around particular hazards or infrastructure sectors. Persistent challenges — in data acquisition and integration, interoperability, model reliability and uncertainty, and the use of digital twin outputs in real decisions — are therefore addressed in separate communities and rarely considered together. So too is the question of what digital twins fail to capture, including data gaps and the people and places least visible in urban data.
This special issue brings together research along the full chain by which a city becomes machine-legible: how urban data are sensed and integrated, how cities and their infrastructure systems are represented in digital models, how those models are used to analyse and simulate climate impacts, and how their outputs inform adaptation, mitigation and resilience. Contributions may address one stage of this chain or several, and may concern any climate hazard, infrastructure sector or region. Studies from rapidly urbanising and climate-exposed regions, and work that critically examines the limitations of current digital twins, are particularly welcome.
We invite original research papers, technical papers, case studies, conceptual papers, literature reviews and viewpoints from engineering, planning, geography, environmental science, computer science and related fields. Authors are encouraged to make clear the practical implications of their work for cities, infrastructure operators or policymakers, and to share data and code openly where possible.
List of topic areas
- Sensing and data acquisition for climate-related urban processes, including remote sensing, IoT, mobile and crowdsourced data
- Integration of multi-source, multi-scale urban data; interoperability, standards and data quality
- Urban digital twin architectures, data models and semantic representations (e.g. GIS, BIM, CityGML, knowledge graphs)
- Representing infrastructure systems and their interdependencies — transport, energy, water and buildings
- Modelling and simulation of climate hazards and their urban impacts — flooding, extreme heat, drought, storms and sea-level rise
- AI, machine learning and data analytics for prediction, forecasting and risk assessment
- Scenario analysis for climate adaptation and mitigation planning
- Monitoring, early warning and emergency response
- Digital twin–supported planning, policy and governance for climate resilience and net-zero transitions
- What digital twins miss: data gaps, uncertainty, social vulnerability, equity and community participation.
Submissions information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fcj?_gl=1*1fpw8e9*_gcl_au*NDA1MjcxMTAxLjE3ODcxMzI0Nzg.*_ga*NDQ2MjcyNDQwLjE3NDc5NDAxODY.*_ga_45RWY1YP1V*czE3OTEyOTU1NTQkbzcxMSRnMSR0MTc5MTI5NTU3OCRqMzYkbDAkaDA.
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emerald.com/journals/author-guidance/1627/emerald-publishing-author-guidelines
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else while under review for this journal.
Key deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 15th January 2027
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 15th May 2027
Closing date for abstract submission: 28th February 2027
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