IUCRC Planning Grant CUNY Site: Center for Climate Risk Applications CCRA

As human-emitted greenhouse gas pollution warms the planet and changes the dynamics of the climate system, losses due to weather extremes and their impacts on human life and property has become a significant and costly challenge. Reliance on historical records with outdated climate states, coarse model resolution, and incongruency between the spatiotemporal scale of impacts exacerbates the problem and presents serious difficulties for the insurance and finance sectors that rely on accurate assessment of natural perils and the corresponding uncertainties around their frequency, intensity, and duration.

This knowledge is required to cover climate disaster related losses that, annually, reach well into tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. To address this challenge, three institutions: George Mason University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the City University of New York have come together to plan an industry-university cooperative research center that addresses the critical, high priority needs of the insurance and finance sectors, both of which are wrestling with uncertainties in assessing risks and damages due to climate-related disasters.

Center research thrusts include: (1) improving climate predictions at spatiotemporal scales needed by the insurance and finance industries; (2) modeling the catastrophic impacts of natural perils to critical infrastructure systems; and (3) quantifying how the local environment modifies the frequency, intensity, and impact of weather-related natural perils on people and property. Broader impacts of the Center would include increased national economic stability by providing better and more reliable tools for assessing climate risk; training the next generation of climate science, engineering, and policy professionals able to tackle the challenges that a changing climate poses to the nation; and broadening the diversity of underrepresented groups in climate disaster modeling field.

Research conducted by the Center for Climate Risk Applications, now in the planning phase, will focus on addressing existing gaps on the impact of climate change on a range of natural perils by analyzing state-of-the-art climate model ensembles, improving existing models, and advancing the science of integration between climate modeling and asset-scale risks. Research will analyze and improve the output of climate models at the actionable spatial and temporal scales required by the insurance and finance sectors of the economy.

The Center will also develop new methods for downscaling hazard information to asset-scale granularity, while quantifying uncertainties of year-to-decadal climate predictions. Additional work will address the sensitivity of interconnected infrastructure systems to a changing landscape of natural perils and the potential for disruption of critical services and supply/value chains.

Natural disasters impact people, not just infrastructure; thus, the Center, presently in the planning stage will also focus on how public policy and regulation impacts the insurance of properties, as well as how existing frameworks for decision-making around these perils inform resilience efforts in the private and public sectors. The Center's education and outreach activities will help enable and maintain healthy insurance and reinsurance markets to promote economic stability and growth in the face of severe threats from climate change to life and property.

It will also develop a diverse, knowledgeable, and capable workforce necessary to quantify risks of climate change for those owning assets that need protection as well as the need to improve their ability to understand and predict risks and create policies, standards, and incentives that reduce the risks of loss due to climate change. The City University of New York brings to the Center its decades of experience and expertise in remote sensing, ground observations, urban planning, and hydrology as well as its diverse student body from a wide variety of races and ethnicities that will increase diversity in the climate disaster modeling workforce.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.