AT&T Launches Climate Risk Data, Allows Communities to Prepare for Climate Change

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One in three Americans say they have been personally affected by an extreme weather event in the past two years. Communities across the US face an unprecedented challenge to simultaneously respond to and prepare for the shocks that climate change is wreaking on infrastructure, critical systems, and people. To prepare, AT&T, FEMA and the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have announced the launch of the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal.

Using climate science modeling, ClimRR gives state, local, tribal, and territorial emergency managers and community leaders free access to localized data about future climate risks that can be used to explore strategies for resilience. Initial hazards included in ClimRR are temperature, precipitation, wind and drought conditions. Additional risks, such as wildfire and flooding, will be added in coming months.

ClimRR provides peer-reviewed climate datasets in a non-technical format and puts high-resolution, forward-looking climate insights into the hands of those who need them most. Community leaders and public safety officials can now understand how increasing climate risks will affect their populations. Access to this information will assist leaders as they strategically invest in infrastructure and response capabilities to protect communities.

Climate projections from ClimRR can be overlayed with community and infrastructure information sourced from the Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT). Combining data from ClimRR and RAPT allows users to understand local-scale climate risks in the context of existing community demographics and infrastructure, including the location of vulnerable populations and critical infrastructure. 

Last year, decision makers at large businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom said climate instability poses substantial risk to their bottom lines, many putting greater emphasis on that danger than growing revenue or profitability, but there was a divide in terms of their belief in their ability to mitigate the concern.

The Cervest 2021 Climate Intelligence Outlook surveyed more than 800 senior executives responsible for climate-related strategies and found 87% believe their organizations understand the financial risk climate change poses, but only 47% had integrated the issue into their financial risk management. About the same number said their companies are not actively assessing and managing climate risks and more than a third don’t think their businesses have allocated enough resources to tackle the problem.