For more than a decade Karsten Arnbjerg‐Nielsen has focussed on research that aims at understanding climate change impacts and how these should be integrated into the formation of sustainable and smart liveable cities, i.e. cities that uses water in an intelligent way to become more resilient to climatic extremes and provides ecosystem services to the inhabitants with minimal resource consumption.

The main research areas include use of statistics for process identification and modelling of precipitation extremes and urban drainage modelling, risk assessments and risk management of flooding, and climate change impacts.