To experiment, innovate, and grow, our R&D is local, context-specific, and project-driven.
Highway 1 flooded near Mill Valley, California (6 November 2025);
courtesy of Peter Godfrey-Smith.
_ Recovering Together in Los Angeles County
Our work in Los Angeles County is the beginning of HelpMap’s next steps and our ambitious deployment strategy. This pilot focuses on integrating community-generated situational awareness with county-level emergency operations, allowing residents and agencies to collaborate through a shared, realtime map during wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and power disruptions. The project advances new protocols for location-based notifications, multilingual reporting, and mutual-aid volunteer coordination—creating a durable model for climate-adaptation technologies at metropolitan scale.
_ Localizing AI in Montréal
As a contributor to the Localizing AI research grant, our pilot in Montréal focuses on building responsible, community-aligned ML and AI tools that strengthen public understanding of climate risk and enhance preparedness. The work integrates CogniCity OSS with new AI models to support vulnerable communities and neighborhood organizations. Over the multi-year collaboration, the Montréal pilot will produce open research, participatory design methods, and deployable tools that can scale across Québec and Canada.
_ Supporting Cognicity oss Testing in Karachi
In Karachi, our pilot is grounded in long-term partnerships with the NGO Community Climate Design, as well as climate researchers and local designers. Here, the platform supports neighborhood-level reporting on heat stress, flooding, waste management, and other hazards. By combining HelpMap’s open-source infrastructure with Community Climate Design’s methodology for localization, the Karachi pilot demonstrates how hyper-local environmental knowledge can shape urban resilience strategies in cities facing extreme climate pressures.
Learn more
_ Creating a Free 24/7 Support System Worldwide
By the end of 2027, our goal is to operate a 24/7 incident-driven HelpMap, delivering real-time situational awareness, crisis reporting, and community coordination worldwide. Building on the pilots in Los Angeles, Karachi, and Montreal, the global rollout will interconnect regional instances into a single, resilient adaptation infrastructure that is capable of supporting emergency managers, humanitarian responders, local governments, and residents globally at no cost to users.
This strategy includes establishing three HelpMap Operations Hubs to ensure uninterrupted monitoring, verification, and technical support. Each hub will run a cloud-synchronized versions of CogniCity OSS, allowing local context to inform global intelligence while preserving community control over data.
Ultimately, the 24/7 HelpMap will function as a planetary public good: a responsive, incident-driven adaptation technology that can facilitate community responses with no prior training; this global system will reshape how residents can work together and support each other to reduce risk vulnerability, equitably allocate resources, and build resilience in a rapidly changing climate.
Follow the project
