- Extreme weather is having a clear impact on our planet, amplifying both physical and economic risks.
- Institutions across sectors need to understand these risks to accurately report them, mitigate their impact, and build more resiliency into their plans.
- Cotality's Climate Risk Analytics makes it easier to identify, score, disclose, and standardize property risks by converting them into quantifiable economic impact.
As extreme weather events grow in both frequency and severity, broad regional averages are no longer enough to protect real estate portfolios, financial assets, or critical infrastructure. Two adjacent parcels can face vastly different vulnerabilities depending on elevation, building materials, and other factors.
To truly understand the potential impact of our changing environment, organizations need climate risk analysis at the individual property level. By pinpointing exposure for specific structures and parcels, institutions can evaluate both physical and transition risks with the precision needed to protect their bottom line and plan for long-term resilience.
What is Cotality's Climate Risk Analytics?
Cotality's Climate Risk Analytics (CRA) offers a comprehensive view of the future at an unprecedented level of granularity.
By combining industry-leading property data with first-in-class replacement costs, valuation models, and natural hazard information, we build an extensive analysis of property risk. Organizations can use this AI-ready data to perform portfolio-wide stress tests and convert physical risks into financial outcomes.
Covering roughly 175 million structures across the continental U.S. and Washington D.C., CRA is structured around two core offerings. Together, they encompass 17 different scenarios, including nine acute perils, four chronic perils, and four composite variations:
- Chronic Perils addresses long-term climate changes including cold waves, heat waves, extreme precipitation, and drought.
- Acute Perils includes a comprehensive set of risk metrics for earthquakes, wildfires, inland flooding, severe convective storms, winter storms, hurricane/tropical storm surge, and wind.
How does Climate Risk Analytics work?
CRA uses catastrophe modeling optimized for Climate Risk Scenarios prescribed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with increasing severity (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5).
Recognized as the best software platform to measure the physical impact of natural disasters on real-world infrastructure, CRA bridges the gap between broad climate patterns and hyper-local impact. It's built on four key pillars:
- Granular property characteristics: Evaluates structural vulnerability using specific attributes including building type, year built, roof age, first-floor height, and land-use classification.
- Property-level financial data: Integrates replacement costs and automated valuation models (AVMs) to translate physical damage directly into financial outcomes.
- Historical and simulated hazard data: Leverages the industry's largest and most comprehensive historical weather and catastrophic event set to model hazard frequency and severity.
- IPCC scenario analysis: Incorporates curated data and dynamically downscaled models from the IPCC. Analyzing scenarios defined by the IPCC's RCP and SSP models, CRA runs a high-resolution simulation of perils across current and future timeframes.
Through rigorous analysis, CRA calculates the expected financial losses for individual properties. The Cotality Composite Risk Score (scaled 1-100) represents the sum of the Average Annual Loss (AAL) relative to the calculated Reconstruction Cost Value (RCV) across hazards – giving stakeholders a consistent, apples-to-apples metric for risk assessment across diverse portfolios.
Key use cases for Climate Risk Analytics
Our proprietary climate models calculate the likelihood of what can happen where – making it easier to protect your property, prepare accurate compliance, and reduce the impact on your bottom line. Use cases include:
- Portfolio-wide stress testing: Quantify expected financial losses across multiple decades to evaluate portfolio resilience under mild to severe warming trajectories.
- Regulatory and ESG financial disclosures: Streamline climate-related financial reporting and comply with physical risk disclosure mandates using standardized, auditable metrics.
- Underwriting, pricing, and valuation: Balance risks and opportunities by factoring structure-specific attributes and forward-looking peril scores directly into lending, insurance, and investment decisions.
- Regional infrastructure and capital planning: Guide long-term resource allocation, resilience upgrades, and market expansion using chronic peril indices and parcel-level hazard projections.
- Standardizing economic impact: Convert physical hazard exposures into standardized economic values to inform enterprise-wide risk management strategies.
Build a more resilient future with Cotality
Navigating the physical and economic realities of a changing climate requires data that is both scientifically rigorous and financially actionable.
By combining IPCC-aligned climate modeling, comprehensive hazard histories, and deep property intelligence, Cotality's Climate Risk Analytics helps your organization measure, mitigate, and manage exposure with confidence.
Ready to see how property-level climate insights can strengthen your portfolio? Contact us to learn more.
