Activating Resilience with Synthetic Twins
The term 'unprecedented' can only be used so many times before we start to recognize the patterns of immediate change in our world and environment.
Wildfires, cold snaps, heatwaves; these are only a handful of events whose impacts are worsening on an annual basis. The unprecedented is no longer acute; it is chronic, and decision-makers are expected to adapt to any number of changing tomorrows. They need people-centred toolsets that can converge, accelerate, and activate resilience in their communities.
Synthetic Twins offer endless possibilities for augmenting intelligence, sandboxing scenarios, and accelerating resilient and sustainable futures. We’re already using them to prepare leaders for emergencies before the alarms ring.
Adapting to Chronic Wildfires
Devastating wildfires are now seasonal events. Leaders are seeking to utilize data more efficiently to enhance community wildfire efforts. RWI's Synthetic Twins converge and visualize datasets, and include the most crucial resilience resource: people.
The Canadian 2025 wildfire season saw 160 wildfires, month-long states of emergency, the second-worst fires in terms of area burned and carbon emissions, in addition to two tragic civilian deaths in Lac du Bonnet, Winnipeg. Many of these started as “zombie fires,” which were leftover from the 2023 Wildfire Season, itself a continuation of 2022's, the most destructive in Canadian history. The Canadian Government has recently announced funding to mobilize wildfire knowledge and data following the 2025 wildfire season, advancing disaster prevention, mitigation, and resilience.
“Wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense, and more dangerous — and more and more communities across Canada are feeling the impacts first-hand,” said Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Corey Hogan in a statement.
Hogan announced $45.7 million in funding for 30 federal projects on Aug. 10 through programming by Natural Resources Canada. This included the founding of the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, which is uniting experts and officials across communities and spheres to “drive science-based action and support Indigenous fire stewardship to improve wildfire prevention and response.”
In “Data is the New Sandbag,” Adam McAllister states that “the challenge for emergency managers and elected officials isn’t just access to data - it’s using it well.”
Utilizing, converging, and augmenting data to create visualized and accessible, people-centred simulations continues to be a primary application of RWI’s Synthetic Twins.
We simulate fire events to benefit decision-makers in our communities, and our 6D modelling platform always includes Synthetic Populations alongside the 3D environment, time, and context. People are not only the most vital resource to be protected through resiliency efforts, but they are also essential assets for prevention.
In her article "From Risk to Resilience," social innovation consultant Lisa Armstrong identified people as key assets to be both protected and harnessed during wildfire events.
"[Human resources and social networks] don't just sit idle during an emergency," Armstrong says. "They become force multipliers when activated and connected, especially in remote or under-resourced areas."
We're transforming wildfire resilience in six dimensions, ensuring people are never left out of the equation.
Preparing for Unprecedented Weather Events
What populations would be most at-risk in the city of Nashville if an unprecedented weather event brought the temperature to -10°F and peak energy demand caused a power outage?
We partnered with the Electric Power Research Institute, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the City of Nashville to highlight and make visible the neighborhoods and populations that would be in danger during such an event.
RWI generated Nashville, including a Synthetic Population, to measure risk, illustrate human responses to disruption, and show how households might access necessities, such as generators, fuel, and food.
Synthetic Populations enable us to understand how different populations experience and react to dropping temperatures. The use of heating appliances that households had available before outages, such as plug-in and baseboard heaters, creates some unique behind-the-meter demands on the grid. We can monitor the demand growth on synthetic grid circuits in advance of an extreme cold event.
Synthetic Populations also help us see how many will be left not only in the dark but with medical conditions requiring support, expensive refrigerated medications at risk of spoiling, and without access to resilience centers, such as community centres or police stations.
We didn’t just create one scenario of a weather-induced power disruption; we created scenario models for 2-day, 3-day, and 7-day disruptions, illustrating how the needs of at-risk populations evolved.
Our models identified the five key areas within Synthetic Nashville that were most at-risk. These disadvantaged neighborhoods had high concentrations of older, single-family homes with poor insulation, inefficient heating technologies, and fewer churches, fire stations, or other locations that could serve as resilience hubs during a weather emergency.
Analyzing Compounding Disasters
What would happen in your region if a power outage forced 1.5 million people into the dark during a combined heat wave and smoke event? RWI’s Regional Advanced Laboratory - Edmonton (REAL) which converges and analyzes insights from our Synthetic Twin of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, simulated just that: an unprecedented cascading disaster in late September.
With a heat wave and windows closed due to a smoke event, air conditioning usage was higher than on a typical day, as commuters were heading home. This is when our synthesized blackout took effect, plunging the metropolitan region into darkness. Not only did we identify the exact number of school-age children stranded due to offline LRT systems, but we also quantified the number of students with asthma who’d be forced to walk.
Using data from comparable outages, the Holodeck identified the number of individuals who would be trapped in elevators requiring assistance and whether communication systems would also be down.
Beyond the immediate needs and the moments following the outage, we also dialled forward to four hours and then 24 hours post-outage to examine the effects of an extended blackout. We showed food and medicines perishing in fridges, the community centres and institutions where people seeking assistance would congregate, and the effect on critical infrastructure that requires electricity.
Visualizing the full breadth of the blackout in six dimensions results in a high-fidelity, people-centred simulation, including the estimated 2,329 people trapped in elevators, the 279,410 school-aged children needing to get home now without transit access, and the 1,132,380 across the entire metropolitan region who are vulnerable and needing assistance after the first 24 hours.
Information preceding the event covered the current air quality, as well as the exact day of the week and time of day when the outage occurred, including small details that would have intense ramifications for how specific populations would respond.
This information, along with additional details, was presented to decision-makers in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, providing powerful, data-backed insights to help them collaboratively de-risk and mitigate hazards in the world’s first urban synthetic laboratory.
Conclusion
RWI’s Synthetic Twins are redefining resilience and transforming data-backed visualizations into human-centred insight.
Through our augmented 6D platform, we empower leaders to anticipate crises, protect vulnerable populations, and strengthen community preparedness before disasters strike. From wildfire resilience to compounding disaster scenarios, our Synthetic Twins reveal not just what could happen, but also how people, infrastructure, and systems will respond.
By converging intelligence and innovation, we’re turning uncertainty into action and activating resilience…