Climate Change Information System for Business and Industry

The Climate Change Information System for Business and Industry (Climate Biz) will translate information derived from climate model simulations into industry-specific formats that will assist private sector executives and their firms to meet the challenge of climate change and thereby prosper in the decades ahead. The opportunity is two-fold. The private sector needs industry-specific information about the potential impacts of climate change in order to manage both risk and opportunity. The computer climate change simulations funded by the U. S. and other nations have been aimed at understanding climate change and sensitivity to greenhouse forcing, not at industry needs. Thus there is both a need and an opportunity to transform the existing scientific information into scenarios and decision aids to assist business and industry, thereby increasing return on a federal investment and making key industries more resilient. The SBIR project will have three main goals: (1) Attempt to rescale the climate change simulations to a common climatological baseline in order to make them more realistic and reliable for business applications; (2) Arrange and combine the climate simulations from U.S. agencies and several other nations so that they can be used to estimate the probabilities that industry variables will become favorable or unfavorable in the next century or so; (3) Create a web-based gateway to the information that serves the needs and capabilities of executives by providing approaches to climate change information that are more meaningful to them than those common to climate modelers and Earth scientists. The Climate Change Information System for Business and Industry will assist agriculture, the conventional and renewable energy industries, water and coastal management, and insurance and finance, among others, to adapt to climate change and continue to contribute strongly to the national welfare and economic vitality. If done well, the information system will be attractive to a wide range of customers here and abroad.