News release – September 23, 2026

Can AI Help Cities Listen to Their Communities? From Community Voices to Climate Action

How can cities build climate resilience while ensuring that community voices are heard and reflected in policy decisions? New research shows how Natural Language Processing (NLP) with expert-validation can help turn community voices into insights for urban climate action.

Published in Urban Climate, the study “From Text to Insight: A Natural Language Processing framework for analysing community perceptions for urban climate resilience” uses Artificial Intelligence to analyse digital narratives and focus-group discussions, uncovering how residents and other social actors perceive climate and environmental risks, and what they see as priorities for building a more resilient and inclusive urban future. 

Focusing on Bairro da Boavista, a Lisbon neighbourhood, the researchers from ISTAR-Iscte analysed community perspectives using a large and overlooked datasets alongside institutional views, uncovering important gaps in risk awareness, communication and trust. By combining NLP with participatory research, the proposed framework offers a new way for cities to identify community concerns, strengthen engagement, and design more inclusive climate adaptation strategies. 

Paper: From Text to Insight: A Natural Language Processing framework for analysing community perceptions for urban climate resilience 

Published in: Urban Climate, 2026 

DOI: 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103133 

Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/22688928