Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Resilience: The Use of Iseechange Crowdsourced Data and AI to Validate Risk and Prioritize Action

Climate change is costing the United States $1B every three weeks. Flooding has cost more than $850B since 2000 in the United States and is responsible for two thirds of the cost from all natural disasters combined. While the projected costs of heat, measured in emergency rooms and heat related hospital admissions, is projected to be $1B each summer or more.

Data on chronic minor flooding and heat incidents is lacking even while carrying a huge financial burden and health impact on frontline communities, who bear disproportionate burdens of both climate risk and pollution. These residents are the least included in decision making, but the most knowledgeable about local conditions and needs. When communities directly affected by environmental injustices actively contribute to monitoring, designing, and maintaining climate infrastructure, it reduces the risk of interventions unintentionally perpetuating systemic environmental burdens.

Unfortunately, cities and utilities are not structured to manage this critical climate impact data and dialogue available from communities. Maintenance issues are reported via 311 and come with service expectations. Emergency issues are reported via 911 and come with rescue expectations. Chronic climate impacts are neither easily serviceable or readily rescuable, and in the silence public distrust increases.The lack of funding and communication, combined with compound climate stresses results in understaffed cities and utilities. This creates uncoordinated responses and lack of real-world validation in infrastructure design, undermining climate investments and jeopardizing safety in vulnerable frontline communities.

ISeeChange (ISC) is an AI-enabled data and community engagement platform to help cities adapt to climate change. By utilizing real-time resident-generated data at the hyperlocal level, ISC empowers cities, counties, and utilities to maintain, manage, and safeguard infrastructure, enabling them to respond to and prevent extreme climate change-induced damage. ISeeChange (ISC) collects real-time observational data at the hyper-local scale, processes and analyzes this data, and delivers it to public sector customers including the City of Miami, Miami Dade County, the City of New Orleans, among others. To date, ISeeChange data has generated $25M in green and stormwater infrastructure investments in low income communities, decreasing both inequitable flooding impacts and pollutants to local waterways by reducing discharge. ISeeChange community data helped to establish and lower the City’s first cooling standard to protect renters from indoor urban heat.