In 2021, AT&T, FEMA, and Argonne National Laboratory recognized the need for accessible, localized climate data to aid communities in risk assessment and hazard mitigation planning. In response, AT&T developed ClimRR, a free data portal offering highly detailed climate projections. This tool provides local-level forecasts for various climate factors, helping communities better prepare for and address climate-related hazards.
Company Name: AT&T
Project Name: Climate Risk and Resilience Portal (ClimRR)
Industry: Telecommunications
Project Location: The United States
Project Partners: Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory; U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office; Project IN-CORE (Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment)
In 2021, AT&T, FEMA, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory identified a need to make localized climate data available at no cost and in an easy-to-use format to help communities integrate such data into their risk assessment processes and inform their hazard mitigation strategies.
AT&T is uniquely positioned to address this issue as it uses forward-looking climate projections in its own operations to help identify which existing infrastructure assets need enhancing to be resilient against extreme weather and what the best locations are for placing new assets. However, AT&T has also recognized that community-level resilience improves the company’s resilience Supporting communities by enabling positive systems-level transformation in climate adaptation solutions also aligns with AT&T’s purpose of connecting people to greater possibilities.
AT&T’s data portal ClimRR offers free, dynamically downscaled climate projections and helps communities better assess and address climate hazards by providing highly localized, forward-looking data for temperatures, heat index, precipitation, drought, wind, and wildfires. The tool highlights two Corporate Climate Resilience Leadership principles in action: “Science-based and Proactive” and “Inclusive and Equitable.”
Project Team: Global Environmental Sustainability Team
The initiative was partially informed by FEMA’s Strategic Plan, which found that access to and understanding of future climate conditions, data, and modeling must be expanded for U.S. communities to understand and reduce their future risk. The three organizations decided to work together to address this challenge and set the following goals for the collaboration:
The data in ClimRR was produced by Argonne using an innovative dynamic downscaling method which, unlike statistical downscaling, uses a simulated, physical model of the earth’s climate, with many unique climate variables progressed in time until the end of the century—producing data that gives a robust understanding of how and where climate change may drive hazards at a local level in the future.
Climate change influences extreme weather events and in many cases makes them more frequent and destructive, which is why FEMA now requires state and local governments to incorporate forward-looking climate data into their hazard mitigation plans. Community planners and disaster mitigation officials need local-level projections for how climate change will drive extreme weather over the coming decades.
Unfortunately, such projections are often offered by for-profit companies that charge more than budget-constrained communities can afford. Additionally, they are available only in highly technical formats that require deep expertise and specialized equipment to analyze or are provided at a scale that is not useful for local planning. AT&T set out to address these challenges to broaden access to high-quality climate data and enable more communities across the United States to plan for and protect their people and infrastructure against climate-related events.
ClimRR gives state, local, tribal, and territorial community planners and disaster mitigation officials free access to localized, peer-reviewed datasets with high-resolution climate insights in a non-technical format. Climate projections from ClimRR can also be overlaid with community and infrastructure information sourced from FEMA’s 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.
Through ClimRR, community planners and disaster mitigation officials are better able to enhance the climate resilience of their communities by improving their understanding of how increasing climate risks will affect their populations, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Access to this information assists leaders as they strategically invest in infrastructure and response capabilities to protect communities for future generations. Over 43,000 users have accessed the ClimRR portal over the past year alone.
AT&T’s work with the Idaho Office of Emergency Management (IOEM) is one example of how ClimRR helps states and communities build resilience. AT&T conferred with IOEM to determine what information would most help the state strengthen its climate resilience and then, with technical support from Project IN-CORE, conducted an analysis using ClimRR that met IOEM’s specific needs. The results were embedded into Idaho’s latest hazard mitigation plan and were also published in an ArcGIS StoryMap.
Another example is a collaborative effort with the city of Longmont, Colorado, where AT&T saw an opportunity for ClimRR to supplement the city’s 2023 heat mapping study. AT&T again engaged Project IN-CORE to work with the city of Longmont to produce a heat analysis for the North Front Range region and identify neighborhood-level heat mitigation strategies in the city. This project was part of AT&T’s Climate Resilient Communities Initiative, which is supporting several cities and counties across the United States in using the ClimRR data to better understand and address climate-related hazards.
To ensure the long-term sustained impact of ClimRR, AT&T, FEMA, and Argonne have made plans to continually update and enhance the portal and are soliciting feedback. Users’ input has already informed updates to the user interface and experience of the portal. It is the hope that with ClimRR data cities can make critical investments in building climate resilience. According to the Chamber of Commerce, every $1 invested in resilience and disaster preparedness saves $13 in economic impact, damage, and cleanup costs after the event.