SBIR Phase II: Climate Analytics Platform for Catastrophe Modeling and Risk Management

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project extends to industry stakeholders holding financial interests that are impacted by climate change. Climate change has a scientifically evident impact on the intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme weather events. It has become imperative for organizations in all sectors to gain a clear understanding of the impacts of climate change on their business so as to inform strategic planning and risk management strategies. Those in the risk transfer industry, in particular reinsurance companies, are the most likely early adopters given their technical sophistication and their increasing and acute awareness of the financial impacts climate change now has on their bottom line. Thus, the company's goal is to penetrate the reinsurance industry as an entry point to the more broadly defined risk transfer industry. Subsequently, the company will utilize the platform to address problems in agricultural investment, real estate investment, and energy planning - all sectors that will be adversely impacted by climate change in specific, well-defined ways. The adaptation in each of these sectors is vital to the well-being and prosperity of the ultimate stakeholder: the American taxpayer. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project aims to harness industry knowledge and expand on the technical work conducted during the company's Phase I project, with the objective of building a modular software platform generalizable to multiple key climate change hazards and extensible to other strategically identified sectors. The knowledge gathered via customer discovery interviews in Phase I will serve as a guide for product development. The technical work completed in Phase I, in particular extreme precipitation modeling under climate change and its application to the risk transfer sector, will serve as a foundation for expansion into the modeling of additional hazards. There are currently no tools available that integrate climate change informatics into risk management at scale. The company aims to address this problem through the translation of physics-guided statistical modeling to a commercial software platform. Upon conclusion of the Phase II project, the company expects to have a completed product that will house data on additional hazards exacerbated by climate change, with applications in the agriculture, commercial real estate, and the energy sectors. The company will show product value through sector-tailored software demonstrations and case studies that demonstrate return on investment to be realized by using this platform. 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.