Welcome to the Climate Risk Map!

This guide is designed to walk you through the Climate Risk Map platform, helping you understand the project and how to get started with the tool. Whether you're new to climate risk or an experienced analyst, this guide will walk you through the key features of the platform, including a comprehensive overview of its capabilities, a step-by-step user quick-start guide, detailed methodology behind the data processing, and insights into the data sources powering the platform.

Climate Risk Map Web Application

Overview

“40 years ago, the US experienced a billion-dollar disaster every four months. Today, we experience a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks."

US Billion Dollar Disaster Events — Source: bts.gov

bts.gov

Climate change carries significant financial risks to Washington state businesses and local communities, and we need to rapidly develop open-source tools and resources to help decision-makers adapt.

Purpose

The Climate Risk Map was built with this urgency in mind. As climate-related hazards increase in both frequency and severity, the need for transparent, data-driven tools to assess and mitigate risks has never been more critical. The platform's primary purpose is to equip decision-makers with the insights necessary to understand the financial impacts of climate on infrastructure and assets, allowing for more resilient planning and resource allocation.

Objectives

Generate Actionable Insights for Climate Risk: Deliver detailed, asset-level risk data that allow users to evaluate infrastructure exposure and vulnerability to climate hazards over different time horizons, supporting informed planning and risk management.
Facilitate Strategic Adaptation and Resilience: Provide long-term climate risk projections under various scenarios to guide resource prioritization and adaptation strategies for public and private stakeholders, enhancing resilience across sectors.
Ensure Transparency and Accessibility: Develop an easily accessible open-source platform that offers transparency into data sources, methodologies, and models. This approach promotes trust, regulatory alignment, and collaboration, while serving the needs of academic, government, and industry users.

By meeting these objectives, the Climate Risk Map seeks to bridge the gap between climate science and practical, real-world decision-making, ensuring that all sectors have the necessary information to build resilience against future climate challenges.

Roadmap

The Climate Risk Map is in its early stages of development, and our journey will unfold in multiple phases as we build out the platform’s capabilities. We are just getting started, and our vision is to continuously evolve the platform, responding to the needs of stakeholders and advancing our understanding of climate risks.

Phase 1: Platform Foundation (Current)

We are laying the groundwork for the platform by building its core components and integrating open-source datasets, such as key climate hazards, infrastructure data, and economic metrics. This phase is about establishing a solid base that future capabilities can grow upon.

Phase 2: Expansion of Data

This phase focuses on expanding the platform’s data quality with higher resolution hazard data and validated, comprehensive physical-asset data. We aim to make this data easily accessible with API access.

Phase 3: Advanced Analytics Features

Introduce advanced analytics capabilities to provide more sophisticated assessments of climate risks. This includes scenario analysis features, enhanced financial risk metrics, and additional visualizations that enable stakeholders to better understand and prepare for climate-related impacts.

The Climate Risk Map is in its early stages of development, and our vision is to continuously evolve the platform. We aim to respond to the needs of stakeholders and advance our understanding of climate risks over time. This roadmap is intended to be flexible, adapting as new challenges, data, and community input shape the project’s direction.

Community Engagement

Community engagement is an integral part of the Climate Risk Map’s development. Our goal is to collaborate closely with public, private, and academic stakeholders to ensure that the platform effectively serves the diverse needs of its users. We are committed to fostering an open-source community where contributors can help validate models, provide local insights, and enhance platform functionality. By involving the community, we aim to make the Climate Risk Map a shared, evolving resource that is relevant, transparent, and impactful.

Quick-Start Guide

Follow this step-by-step guide for a basic overview of the map functionality. The map can be accessed here.

Selecting Climate Scenario Parameters

First, we need to select a combination of parameters for the desired climate scenario.

Select a Climate Risk Measure: Start by choosing a climate metric of interest from the drop-down menu. These are climate hazards curated by our team that may pose potential risks to infrastructure. Choose a Scenario: Select one of the available climate scenarios (e.g., SSP126 for low emissions, SSP585 for high emissions). Scenarios help you understand potential futures under different climate action pathways. Select a Timescale: Use the timeline slider to choose the time period you are interested in, ranging from the 2020s to the 2100s for all months. This lets you see how climate risks evolve over time for particular months of the year. The example on the right illustrates a scenario where the selected measure is "% Area Covered by Burnt Vegetation"—used as a proxy for wildfire risk—under a moderate emissions projection for August in the 2060s.

Selecting Infrastructure Overlays

Second, we need to select the specific types of infrastructure we are interested in visualizing.

Select Infrastructure Overlays: On the right-hand side, you'll see a layers icon. Hover over it to reveal the available infrastructure overlays. In this example, the available infrastructure includes specific types of power grid data, which provides insight into its exposure under the selected climate scenario.

Download Data

From here, you can explore the map and your particular areas of interest visually to get a sense of asset exposure. You may wish to download the data to do an offline analysis, which can be done easily.

Draw a bounding box: On the right-hand side below the layers icon, there is a small black box icon. Clicking this will allow you to draw a box (or multiple boxes) over your area of interest. Click Download Data: On the control panel, click the Download Data button to download a CSV file.

Download Data Output

Below is an example of the data structure you might see when you download the CSV file from the Climate Risk Map. For a full list of fields and their descriptions in the download, see TO DO.

OSM ID	OSM Subtype	County Name	Tags	SSP	Month	Decade	Climate Variable	Climate Exposure
41543109	Line	Douglas County	{'name': 'Grand Coulee-Chief Joseph No 3', 'power': 'line', 'cables': '3', 'voltage': '500000', 'operator': 'Bonneville Power Administration'}	370	8	2060	Burnt Fraction All	0.945
41543169	Line	Douglas County	{'power': 'line'}	370	8	2060	Burnt Fraction All	1.445
41543169	Line	Grant County	{'power': 'line'}	370	8	2060	Burnt Fraction All	1.445
40531749	Line	Douglas County	{'power': 'line'}	370	8	2060	Burnt Fraction All	2.435
40531749	Line	Grant County	{'power': 'line'}	370	8	2060	Burnt Fraction All	1.689

Methodology

This section provides an overview of how the Climate Risk Mapping Application is built and the methodology behind its calculations and data processing.

Data Sources

Climate

% Area that is Covered by Burnt Vegetation: This initial variable for the prototype is sourced from CMIP6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6), which provides multiple scenarios of future climate conditions.