Woodard & Curran’s Climate Risk Assessment is a first-of-its-kind data management, visualization, and prioritization tool that takes climate preparedness from a messy exercise in data collection to an organized, scalable strategy tool. Our proprietary platform combines Global Climate Model (GCM) extraction and downscaling, climate stressor risk quantification algorithms, big data management, geospatial visualization and mapping, and resilience strategy to deliver critical insights to climate-related liabilities and actionable recommendations.
Climate Risk Assessment promotes business continuity and growth for future-focused organizations, supporting public and private sector clients in assessing and mitigating risk related to climate change. Organizations that leverage Climate Risk Assessment enjoy a range of localized and broad-reaching benefits to portfolio resilience and ESG and sustainability performance and reputation management.
What differentiates Climate Risk Assessment from other platforms and service lines that offer accumulated climate data is its greater capacity to support decision making. The interface leverages dozens of GCM climate models and multiple future climate scenarios out to the year 2100 to evaluate the business continuity risk at our client’s assets due to potential climate change scenarios. In addition, Regional Climate Model (RCM) technology is employed, and a hazard composite risk score is calculated for each asset within the user’s portfolio to develop high-resolution comparative physical risk outlooks across a disparate portfolio.
The GCM/RCM extraction and risk score derivation results in a substantial quantity of data that needs to be organized and accessible to be valuable to our clients, so Climate Risk Assessment uses data visualization dashboards with geo-referenced site locations and customizable interfaces to risk information and rankings. The design of our dashboard promotes substantial flexibility in how clients can manipulate and utilize data, providing meaningful insight into vulnerabilities at any scale and within operational segments of their business.
The platform’s latest update brings additional insight and quantifiability to Climate Risk Assessment’s applications for our clients. Woodard & Curran has incorporated hazard loss data into risk calculation algorithms, allowing businesses to produce hard numeric estimates for the cost of climate change to their operations.
When it comes to satisfying ESG obligations to regulators and stakeholders, our Climate Risk Assessment product provides a more comprehensive approach to compiling and reporting the specifics of a business’ climate risks and the actions it will pursue to manage them. Data-oriented and objective, the process shows a business has applied due diligence and seriousness to evaluating climate risk. An analysis platform that backs up data with action, assuring investors, insurers and raters and rankers that they’re getting more than lip service.
With detailed reports and data available via dashboard, the client is empowered to make informed decisions in the planning of capital improvements to enhance resilience and sustain business continuity. In addition, through the distillation of GCM big data into succinct risk visualizations, the client can more readily understand, manage, mitigate, and communicate their climate-related risks within their corporate reporting than with aggregate data collected by competing consultants.
Woodard & Curran is an integrated science, engineering, design-build, and operations company specializing in water and environmental projects.
