At the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP29), IBM and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) unveiled new, publicly available artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions to inform more sustainable urban development for cities and communities globally.

COP29, which is being hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan until November 22, is focusing on ways to expedite action to address the global climate crisis.

According to the two organisations, newly launched AI solution allows decision-makers and legislators to map urbanisation and identify energy and infrastructure needs for developing towns.

Modeling Urban Growth (MUG) is an open-source AI model that predicts where cities will grow.

The model is trained on, and validates, historical data from satellite images; geographic data, such as slope and elevation; demographic data; and structural data, such as road layout, combining the data into a time series.

MUG helps users to map future urbanisation and associated infrastructure needs, enabling decision makers to prioritise communities and developing regions that need support for issues like electrification and energy services.

MUG is an AI Alliance project, and is publicly available and open-source on GitHub.

The model is currently trained on data from Africa, including: Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Malawi.

However, the model is designed to be re-trained by users for any country in the world, using publicly accessible data.

On GitHub, MUG includes an explanatory guidebook on running the code and making predictions using the same or different datasets, which further expands access to developers and decision-makers.

John Matogo, corporate social responsibility leader for Africa and the Middle East at IBM, said: "Collaborating with organisations such as SEforALL our IBM Sustainability Accelerator program helps us unlock innovation and work more closely in communities to tackle some of our biggest challenges, especially around energy and sustainable urban development."

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and special representative of the UN Secretary-General for SEforALL and co-chair of UN-Energy, added: “We believe that integrating AI in the energy sector planning and evidence – especially for developing countries will go a long way in designing comprehensive solutions for many of the developmental challenges currently facing the Global South and its people.

“The Open Building Insights tool, that SEforALL has developed in collaboration with IBM, will help energy planners overcome critical data gap challenges to inform energy access and energy transition interventions, and better deliver results for those most in need.”