DEPRIMAP at the 2026 Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate

Sai Ganesh Veeravalli represented DEPRIMAP at the 2nd Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate, held in Copenhagen on 26 June 2026 and organised by Climate AI Nordics.  He gave an invited talk and presented a poster based on the upcoming Nature Cities paper, which is currently in press.

The work introduces a globally consistent, neighbourhood-scale approach for mapping morphological deprivation, the disadvantage written into the physical form of a city: small, densely packed buildings, limited road access and little open space. The City Segment Morphological Deprivation (CSMD) model combines open building, road and population data with supervised learning trained on eight benchmark cities from the IDEABench dataset, and was applied across 5,132 cities in 103 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

The analysis estimates that approximately 395 million people, 20.2% of the urban population covered, live in morphologically deprived city segments. More than one-third of them, around 136 million, live in small and medium cities rather than in the large metropolitan areas that usually dominate urban and climate debates. Positioned as a screening layer that can be combined with flood and heat exposure data, the framework supports more equitable targeting of climate adaptation and monitoring under SDG 11.1.1.

CSMD Data link: https://zenodo.org/records/20486977

CSMD Code link: https://github.com/saiga143/citysegmentdeprivation

The team thanks the Climate AI Nordics organisers, and Aleksis in particular, for offering an oral slot for this topic alongside the poster, and everyone who engaged with the work during the poster session.