Tight budgets, growing expectations, staff shortages, the tangible impacts of climate change and the pressure to digitalise: anyone responsible for a municipality or city currently has to address these issues in parallel – not one after another. Most of these future challenges have long been recognised. The more difficult task is to establish priorities from this broad range of issues that can be justified professionally, communicated politically and ultimately financed.
Calls for “greater commitment” fall short here. What is needed instead is a clear sense of direction: one that shows where existing resources can have the greatest impact and where scope for action can genuinely be expanded.
Resilience as a test for investment decisions
Resilience can provide this sense of direction – understood not as a new funding programme or an additional project, but as the ability of an administration and a municipality to remain functional under pressure, both in day-to-day operations and in exceptional situations. Resilience is particularly useful as a test when deciding which projects deserve priority: do they reduce the burden on the administration? Do they make critical infrastructure more robust? And do they build structures that will still hold up in five or ten years’ time?
Water management provides a practical example. Longer dry periods, heavy rainfall events and changing precipitation patterns are no longer issues only for major cities; they are increasingly affecting smaller municipalities as well. What is needed is an early look at critical points in the system – combined with the question of how retention areas can be used more effectively and how spatial planning, data availability and administrative responsibilities can be considered together.
New sensors or software are rarely the starting point. In most cases, the process begins with an assessment: where does water run off, and in what quantities? Which infrastructure is particularly vulnerable? Which measurements, responsibilities and risks are already known? Only on this basis do digital twins, sensor networks or forecasting models begin to pay off – and only if they are designed in a way that municipalities can understand, afford and integrate into their everyday work.
The same applies to digital infrastructure. It is never only a technical matter, but always an organisational one as well. If a system fails, data disappear or a communication channel breaks down, this quickly becomes a problem for the public sector’s ability to act. What matters then are clearly defined responsibilities, practised fallback solutions and an overview of which processes, service providers and interfaces are particularly critical in an emergency.
Data centres also belong in this context. They provide the technical basis for digital administrative processes, the use of AI, digital sovereignty and local economic growth. At the same time, they raise questions that more and more regions will have to address: how high is the energy demand? What about network connectivity and land availability? Can waste heat be used? How will the public respond? And how much regional value creation will remain locally? Not every region will become a data centre location, but many will be affected by the consequences.
Water, data, energy, land, funding and responsibilities are therefore more closely connected than they may appear at first glance. This makes it all the more important to make these interdependencies visible: bringing existing knowledge together, prioritising measures that deliver multiple benefits, identifying risks at interfaces early on – and using this to derive steps that can actually be implemented.
aconium at the KGSt Forum 2026
At the KGSt Forum 2026, aconium will show how these considerations can be translated into practice. Two key areas will be presented: smart water management as a building block for climate adaptation and municipal resilience, and data centres as an infrastructure topic at the interface of digitalisation, energy and regional value creation. Both examples show what matters: not trying to resolve every issue at once, but recognising the interdependencies between them at an early stage.
Discover successful projects in digitalisation, energy, mobile communications, mobility and regional development that aconium has implemented in recent years.