Athens, Barcelona and Stockholm advance climate action with AI

European cities are using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify households vulnerable to extreme heat, reduce energy consumption in buildings and detect wildfires before they spread, as new guidance aims to help municipalities manage the technology’s risks.

ICLEI Europe has published a toolkit setting out eight principles for responsible AI in urban climate action. Drawing on the EU AI Act, OECD AI Principles and other international frameworks, it covers transparency, fairness, human oversight, data protection, AI literacy, citizen participation, environmental sustainability and the long-term integration of systems into municipal operations.

Alis-Daniela Torres, Head of the Green and Digital Transformation Team at ICLEI Europe, told Cities Today that officials are facing “an avalanche of information on digital and AI-driven solutions that promise to help them advance their climate mitigation and adaptation goals”.

“They are hesitant to adopt these tools because they want to know how to use them responsibly, including questions around data protection and bias, or how to apply the EU AI Act’s risk categories to a field of action that is often perceived as inherently safe,” she said.

The toolkit highlights work in Athens, Barcelona and Stockholm. Athens is using AI to detect early-stage wildfires and forecast how fires could spread, alongside systems that predict energy demand in municipal buildings, identify unusual consumption and calculate the solar potential of rooftops.

Barcelona’s Climate-Ready project combines more than 50 building-level indicators to identify households exposed to heat and energy poverty. Its climate vulnerability map draws on information including energy consumption, building performance, cadastral records and socio-economic conditions, helping municipal services target support more proactively.

Torres said the project engages at least 18,000 users through Barcelona’s Energy Advisory Centres and My Energy app and delivers more than 90,000 heat and climate alerts annually. The interventions aim to encourage safer behaviour during heatwaves, greater use of climate shelters and changes in household energy use, particularly among vulnerable residents.

Stockholm’s DigiCityClimate platform includes the Spara energy advisory chatbot, which provides residents and housing associations with personalised advice. It also features an Urban Heat Assessor that creates predictive heat maps and a Digital Control Room that monitors building energy use in real time.

“Our impact assessment studies show that, across all three projects, the environmental benefits enabled by the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) solutions implemented outweigh their negative environmental impacts, resulting in a net positive sustainability performance,” Torres said.

In Stockholm, electricity use and emissions were kept relatively low through lightweight models, low-frequency inference and intermittent rather than continuous training. Nevertheless, the toolkit warns that AI’s demand for energy, water and hardware can undermine the climate objectives it is intended to support.

“The first question cities facing climate challenges should ask is simple: is AI really needed?” Torres said. “AI should not be adopted by default, but only when it offers clear added value over simpler alternatives, such as conventional analytics, rule-based systems, or existing planning tools.”

The toolkit provides checklists covering essential, recommended and advanced practices, allowing cities with different levels of staff, data and technical capacity to assess projects. Torres said transparency and explainability should be the starting point because they support accountability, fairness and human oversight.

“More broadly, however, we believe all eight principles can be applied by cities within their own capacities, as the first step of a journey that will take time,” she said.

The guidance draws on ICLEI Action Fund projects backed by Google.org, a review of scientific and policy literature published between 2020 and 2026, and input from 13 experts and 20 urban practitioners.

Main image: Alika Obrazovskaya | Dreamstime.com