From data to impact: Lifecycle-oriented digital twins for urban heat island mitigation and climate resilience

UHI mitigation is increasingly recognized as a governance and adaptation challenge that extends beyond diagnosis to implementation, verification, and iterative adjustment. In response, DT platforms are often presented as end-to-end solutions for supporting this process. However, it remains unclear whether current DT-enabled approaches support the full mitigation cycle in practice. This review addresses that question through a lifecycle-oriented synthesis of 159 DT-UHI studies and approximately 14 representative deployment cases across tropical, coastal, and temperate contexts. To assess operational completeness, each case was mapped against a seven-stage mitigation lifecycle comprising Monitoring, Diagnosis, Planning, Integration, Implementation, Evaluation, and Adaptation. The results reveal a pronounced lifecycle imbalance. Monitoring and Planning are widely supported, appearing in 92% and 77% of cases, respectively, whereas downstream operational closure remains limited, with explicit support for Implementation and Evaluation found in only 15% and 38% of cases. This pattern indicates that DT-UHI systems are concentrated in sensing, modeling, and scenario exploration, while rarely supporting the technical closure needed to verify interventions, compare predicted and observed cooling effects, and update future action on the basis of evidence. In response, this review makes three contributions: it introduces a consistent lifecycle coding framework for benchmarking DT-enabled UHI mitigation, identifies the structural reasons for lifecycle discontinuity across influential DT paradigms, and proposes an Integrated Urban Climate Twin (IUCT) framework that links state memory, as-built traceability, reproducible analytics, and governance-oriented implementation and evaluation workflows. Overall, the review repositions urban climate DTs from planning support tools to adaptive management infrastructure for accountable UHI mitigation.