Bhubaneswar has launched an open Climate Digital Twin that allows residents to check heat, flood and air-pollution risks for individual buildings and neighbourhoods across the city. The platform, launched by Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Tokhan Sahu on Friday, is intended to show how climate conditions vary at a much finer scale than citywide weather or air-quality readings.
The digital model was unveiled during the inauguration of the 19th Urban Mobility India Conference and Expo in Bhubaneswar. Odisha Housing and Urban Development Minister Krushna Chandra Mahapatra was also present at the launch.
Developed by the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation with technical support from GIZ India under the SUM-ACA project of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the platform is available at climate.bmc.gov.in. It does not require a login and can be accessed through a phone, tablet or computer.
The system continuously updates itself with new data and maps climate-related conditions across Bhubaneswar’s 167 square kilometres. Its coverage includes 67 wards, 204 neighbourhoods, about 2,77,000 buildings, more than 2,000 kilometres of roads and over 2,100 public facilities.
Users can select a building on the platform to view location-specific estimates of heat, flood and air-pollution risks. The service is designed to address the limits of relying on a single Air Quality Index reading, temperature measurement or rainfall warning for an entire city, where local conditions can vary significantly between nearby streets.
The variation was visible in readings recorded by BMC sensors on the eve of the launch. At 10 pm on October 22, the sensor at Master Canteen recorded an AQI of 96, while the reading near Kalinga Hospital was 255. The two locations are within the same city but showed a substantial difference in air quality at the same time.
The platform’s building-level mapping also reflects the way urban climate risks are shaped by local conditions. A heat, flooding or pollution exposure identified for one neighbourhood may not apply in the same way to an adjacent area. By making those variations accessible through a single public platform, the digital twin provides residents with more localised information than citywide indicators alone.
The launch places the municipal corporation’s sensor network, spatial data and public-facing digital services within the same system. Its coverage of roads, buildings and public facilities also gives the platform an urban infrastructure dimension beyond weather reporting, although the source report does not specify how the risk estimates will be used for municipal operations or future planning decisions.
For residents, the immediate function is access to location-specific climate information without registration. The platform’s next operational milestones, including any additional datasets, alerts or municipal response mechanisms, were not detailed in the launch report.
