AT&T collaborated with Argonne National Laboratory to develop detailed, future-oriented climate projections at the neighborhood level for integration into AT&T's infrastructure planning processes for better assessment of climate risks.
AT&T collaborated with Argonne National Laboratory to develop detailed, future-oriented climate projections at the neighborhood level for integration into AT&T's infrastructure planning processes for better assessment of climate risks.
Company Name: AT&T
Project Name: Integrating Climate Data into AT&T’s Network Planning
Industry: Telecommunications
Project Location: The United States
Project Partners: U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory
AT&T worked with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to produce forward-looking, neighborhood-level climate projections and integrated the data into infrastructure planning processes and systems to better assess and address climate risk.
For telecommunications company AT&T, reliable connectivity is vital to ensuring communities can thrive—day to day and during times of disaster. The impact of climate-related events on AT&T varies from year to year but can reach hundreds of millions of dollars. From 2016 to 2018, for example, AT&T spent $874 million on natural disasters.
The goal in commissioning high-quality climate data and using it to guide infrastructure decisions was to better prepare our network for a future with more frequent and severe weather events. While this work touches on all of the Principles for Corporate Climate Resilience Leadership, it is most closely associated with the principles of “Science-Based and Proactive” as well as “Safeguarding and Enhancing.”
AT&T has a long history of investing in disaster preparedness and recovery. However, the organization recognized that in a changing climate, the past was no longer a reliable predictor of future impacts. AT&T proactively sought to better understand climate-related risks to its business and selected Argonne National Laboratory as a collaborator to ensure that its efforts incorporated the best available climate science.
To move from awareness to action, AT&T brought together various business units to determine how best to provide climate insights to the planners and engineers responsible for decisions about where to place new network infrastructure and how to protect existing infrastructure. By integrating sophisticated climate data directly into their systems and processes, these decision-makers can more effectively safeguard and enhance AT&T’s network.
AT&T commissioned Argonne National Laboratory to produce climate projections for adaptation efforts. Prior to this new climate data, AT&T’s infrastructure and disaster preparedness decisions were based primarily on historical hazard data and 10-day weather forecasts.
Collaboration with Argonne changed that. Now the company is able to identify locations that are at higher exposure to climate impacts in the year 2050. Projections cover the continental United States and include hazards such as inland flooding, coastal flooding, high-intensity winds, drought and wildfires.
AT&T also uses the climate data to make informed decisions about where to invest in resilience measures for existing network assets and where to place new equipment to minimize climate-related risks. For example, to make the network more resilient, AT&T invests in backup power as well as flood-proofing solutions that help keep equipment out of harm’s way and up and running for customers. Climate data helps pinpoint which sites are most at risk from climate-related impacts so that the company can prioritize those sites for resilience enhancements. For instance, AT&T put floodgates on the doors of central offices in the Southeast and Gulf regions that have been identified as facing flood risk–critical in hurricane-prone areas.
When AT&T is required to create a new mobility site for coverage, capacity, or relocation needs, typically a handful of factors are taken into consideration like radiofrequency coverage, fiber proximity, rent, etc. Now AT&T also factors in climate-related hazards that can impact the network, such as wind, wildfire, drought, inland flooding, and coastal flooding, into our network build processes. AT&T’s mobility planning tool integrates these risks so when a designer considers location options for a new piece of mobility equipment, physical climate risks can be incorporated into the decision.
There has been growing interest from business units across the company in leveraging the climate data to enhance decision-making. To enhance AT&T’s climate resiliency, the company continues to analyze how climate hazards might change over time, identify any potential exposure to escalating hazards in critical geographies, and identify solutions to reduce potential risk.
For example, AT&T prepared a climate-informed vulnerability analysis of over 7,000 AT&T central offices, identifying about 500 central offices at risk for future flooding. The Global Real Estate (GRE) team and the Network Resiliency office can use this analysis to prioritize locations where floodgates need to be installed on the doors of vulnerable central offices. Installing floodgates can reduce operational expenses, like the cost of repeated sandbagging, in preparation for future flood warnings and advisories.