Climate Risk Data Quality

Public climate data is abundant but coarse. Asset-level risk analysis needs resolution public data can't provide, so a private, well-funded market has emerged to close that gap with proprietary, often AI-driven methods. We think that market's structure — who can afford fine-grained data, and who can't — is itself a climate justice problem, made worse when the data isn't even reliably accurate.

• · Public satellite/reanalysis data (NASA, ESA/Copernicus) is openly available but coarse by design — ERA5 runs on a ~31km grid, far too coarse for single-building decisions
• · That resolution gap creates a commercial market for asset-level data, often via proprietary AI-driven downscaling, dominated by well-capitalized banks, insurers, and vendors
• · If only well-funded companies can produce high-quality fine-grained data, access becomes a climate justice problem — hitting hardest the regions least responsible for climate change
• · We argue for challenging the funding model, the underlying methods, and the market model together, while staying honest that no general solution exists yet