Artificial intelligence, a new horizon for local governance and climate adaptation
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as an essential lever for reinventing the governance of territories. Long seen as a technology reserved for the industrial domain or cutting-edge research, it is now central to local public policies. Whether optimizing mobility, managing the energy transition, anticipating climate risks, or enhancing citizen participation, AI offers communities a strategic tool to inform decision-making and build more sustainable and resilient transition paths.
This article provides a thorough exploration of these new uses, highlighting the opportunities, challenges, and precautions necessary for AI to become a genuine partner of the territories.
Territorial governance in the age of big data
The digital transformation of territories relies on an explosion of data flows. They come from sensors installed in cities, open databases (open data), satellite images, and also from citizen contributions. This profusion of information, if properly exploited, can provide communities with a systemic view of their territory.
AI plays a central role here: it can process vast amounts of data, identify correlations invisible to the human eye, simulate prospective scenarios, and produce reliable decision-support indicators. It thus transforms raw data into actionable knowledge, allowing for the anticipation of needs, real-time adjustments to public policies, and improved allocation of resources.
Concrete and varied applications
1. Sustainable and decarbonized mobility
Home-to-work mobility remains one of the main environmental challenges for territories, especially in peri-urban areas where solo driving predominates. AI allows optimization of movement flows by modeling journeys, simulating the carbon impact of different modes of transport, and proposing more sustainable alternatives (carpooling, public transport, active mobility). It can also facilitate the design and monitoring of mobility plans by crossing field data, real behaviors, and medium-term projections.
2. Energy transition
AI contributes to the energy transition by modeling consumption, identifying renewable energy potentials, and monitoring the energy performance of buildings and infrastructures in real time. It helps detect inefficiencies, forecast future needs, and guide investments towards the most effective solutions, thus reconciling budget savings and emissions reduction.
3. Management of climate and health risks
Floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires: territories are exposed to increasingly frequent and intense climate hazards. AI improves the accuracy of forecasts by cross-referencing historical data, satellite observations, and in-situ sensors. It helps map vulnerable areas, simulate evolution scenarios, and establish early warning systems. It is also used to assess health risks related to the environment, for example, by analyzing the impact of air pollution on public health.
4. Enhanced citizen participation
Local governance cannot be limited to a technocentric approach. AI can act as an accelerator of participatory democracy, automatically processing contributions from public consultations, dynamically mapping local expectations, and feeding collaborative tools for the co-construction of urban projects. Far from replacing citizen dialogue, it amplifies it and makes it more readable.
AI in the Face of Climate Change: A Tool for Adaptation
Beyond daily management, one of the major challenges for territories remains adaptation to climate change. The impacts are already being felt and require rapid, coordinated responses based on knowledge.
AI can help to understand and anticipate climate hazards by improving the accuracy of forecasts and assessing their consequences on infrastructure, natural resources, and populations. It thus becomes a powerful tool for territorial planning, capable of guiding land use choices, prioritizing protective investments, and optimizing resource allocation in the face of hazards.
For example, by assessing the costs and benefits of adaptation actions – such as soil renaturation, strengthening electrical networks, or water management – AI enlightens decision-makers on the most relevant long-term options.
Challenges and Precautions
These exciting prospects should not overshadow the challenges. The integration of AI into territorial governance and climate adaptation raises several questions:
Data Quality and Accessibility: without reliable data, AI produces biased results. Communities must invest in the collection, normalization, and secure sharing of data.
Transparency and Trust: algorithms must be understandable and explainable to preserve the trust of citizens and avoid a “black box” decision-making process.
Ethics and Governance: AI must respect legal frameworks, protect privacy, and prevent potential discrimination.
Local Ownership: solutions cannot be imposed “from above.” They must be co-constructed with elected officials, technicians, economic actors, and residents to ensure their relevance and adoption.
Towards a New Territorial Contract
Far from replacing political decision-making, AI informs and strengthens it. It allows territories to better understand their own dynamics, leverage their strengths, and design transition paths suited to their local realities. In this sense, it constitutes a tool for local sovereignty and a pillar of sustainability.
It can become a catalyst for innovation, a support for resilience in the face of climatic upheavals, and a vector for renewed citizen participation. But for it to fulfill this promise, it is essential to move beyond a technocentric view and consider AI as a partner, not as an end in itself.
Conclusion: an opportunity to seize
Artificial intelligence offers territories a unique opportunity to combine innovation, resilience, and participatory democracy. It paves the way for a more precise local governance, capable of anticipating risks, optimizing resources, and steering the ecological transition.
However, its success relies on three conditions: the transparency of algorithms, the quality of data, and co-construction with local stakeholders. Under these conditions, AI can become not only a lever for modernizing public action but also an instrument of trust and sustainability at the service of territories and their inhabitants.
From theory to action with UrbanThinkPlatform®
At K-LC, we have developed UrbanThinkPlatform®, a territorial digital twin platform that embodies these uses of AI. Specifically, UrbanThink® aggregates and analyzes multi-source data (mobility, energy, climate, biodiversity, air quality...) to generate dynamic indicators and prospective scenarios. Thanks to its thematic modules, the solution helps communities to:
anticipate climate risks (floods, submersion, heatwaves),
plan and monitor the energy transition,
design decarbonized mobility plans,
integrate citizen participation into their planning strategies.
Thus, UrbanThinkPlatform® illustrates how artificial intelligence can be transformed into a concrete decision-making tool, allowing territories to move from raw data to targeted and measurable action.
