Why We Built NOAH CityTwin™

February 6, 2026

A recent article in The Energy Mix highlights a growing risk that many municipal leaders already feel on the ground: cities that fail to properly assess climate risk are setting themselves up for long-term financial and infrastructure instability. In the United States, researchers are now documenting a “climate-debt doom loop,” where repeated climate shocks erode property values, weaken municipal tax bases, and make it increasingly difficult to finance the resilience investments communities need to remain safe and solvent. Canada is not immune to this dynamic. While our municipal finance system differs from that of the U.S., the underlying risk exposure is the same. Climate impacts are accelerating, infrastructure is aging, and many municipalities lack the tools needed to understand their true risk, let alone to prioritize and finance adaptation in a disciplined, defensible way. This is the gap NOAH CityTwin™ was created to address.

The Need for Decision-Grade Insights

Most municipalities today are not ignoring climate change. The challenge is structural rather than motivational. Cities are being asked to make multi-decade infrastructure decisions about stormwater systems, roads, buildings, and emergency response using tools that were never designed to account for compounding climate risk. Climate studies often arrive as static reports. Engineering assessments live in separate silos. Financial planning models rarely integrate physical risk in a meaningful way. The result is a disconnect between climate science and capital planning, between risk awareness and investment prioritization, and between adaptation intent and implementable projects. NOAH CityTwin™ was built to close that gap.

From Reports to Living City-Scale Intelligence

NOAH CityTwin™ is a city-scale climate intelligence and digital twin platform that allows municipalities to see, test, and act on climate risk in an integrated decision environment. Rather than producing another report, the platform creates a living digital representation of a city, bringing together climate hazards, infrastructure assets, and financial implications in a queryable single system. Municipal leaders can quantify physical climate risk, evaluate vulnerability across asset classes, test adaptation scenarios, and understand trade-offs before capital is committed. This enables a shift from reactive responses to proactive, evidence-based decisions grounded not only in climate projections, but in how those projections interact with real infrastructure and real budgets.

Making Climate Adaptation Capital-Ready

One of the most important insights raised in The Energy Mix article is that climate adaptation struggles to attract capital not because it lacks value, but because that value is rarely made legible to financial decision-makers. Adaptation reduces risk, protects tax bases, and avoids future losses, yet those benefits are often diffuse, long-dated, and difficult to quantify. NOAH CityTwin™ was designed to change that dynamic. By translating physical climate risk into prioritized, defensible investment pathways, the platform helps municipalities and their partners turn resilience into projects that can be evaluated, financed, and delivered. In doing so, it creates a bridge between climate science, engineering, insurance, and capital, allowing adaptation to be treated not as a cost centre, but as a strategic investment in long-term fiscal stability.

Scaling Capacity Across Municipalities

The article also underscores another reality: many Canadian municipalities, particularly smaller and mid-sized communities, simply do not have the internal capacity to conduct sophisticated climate risk assessments. NOAH CityTwin™ is built to scale across that reality. By providing a shared, standardized, and technically rigorous platform, it gives communities of different sizes access to the same level of decision-grade climate intelligence, helping ensure that resilience planning is not limited to the largest or best-resourced cities.

Why this Matters Now

We built NOAH CityTwin™ because the next phase of climate adaptation will not be won by awareness alone. It will be won by communities that can clearly understand their risk, prioritize investments with confidence, attract capital and insurance support, and make resilience a measurable part of long-term planning. As climate impacts intensify, the cost of inaction accrues interest. The choice facing municipalities is no longer whether to adapt, but whether they will do so deliberately or be forced into it by crisis. NOAH CityTwin™ exists to give cities the clarity, confidence, and tools they need to choose the former.