Bridging the gap: integrating Earth science and property data for climate resilience

Institutions across the property market currently face a significant "blind spot" regarding how shifting environmental patterns will impact specific infrastructure and the people within them. 

When decision-makers lack granular, predictive intelligence, they are often forced to rely on historical observations and models. This results in strategies built on recovery rather than readiness, missing the opportunity to adapt before disaster strikes.

To address this, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Cotality engaged in an 18-month exploration to assess current and future structural risks.

Traditional climate projection models often operate on a coarse grid—sometimes on the scale of 50 kilometers. While these models are instrumental for predicting regional temperature shifts or sea-level rise, they lack the resolution required to tell a facility manager how a specific building will fare against a wildfire or a flood.

For insights to be actionable, they must come down to the property level.

A collaborative framework: The "social DEM"

This project represented a collaboration between the Earth science components of teams at JPL and other NASA centers responsible for facility planning. By integrating Cotality’s granular property data—which covers 99.99% of the built infrastructure in the U.S.—with NASA’s environmental models, the teams were able to create a building-by-building risk map.

Key components of this integrated data approach included:

• Structural detail: Assessing building materials, age, and specific vulnerabilities to the elements.
• Predictive mapping: Translating exposure into potential loss over a 100-year timeframe.
• Digital twins: Laying the foundation for dynamic, computational replicas of urban environments for "what if" scenario planning.

By combining NASA JPL’s environmental data with detailed structure data—a concept that has been termed a "social DEM" (Digital Elevation Model)—it becomes possible to model the intricate interplay between natural hazards, built infrastructure, and the people who occupy them.

Illuminating future possibilities

What emerged from this partnership was not just a map for resilience, but a potential pathway for how property-level hazard assessments could become a standard practice for large institutions looking to prepare for a changing environment.

This collaboration demonstrates that the most powerful insights arise at the intersection of disciplines. By marrying the macro-scale science at JPL with micro-scale property precision, a clearer path toward a resilient future is being laid.