Various types of infrastructure assets can have the potential to provide important benefits, from new jobs to ecosystem services, and avoid significant costs. Assessing these costs and benefits, however, requires a full understanding of the climate-related risks and externalities, which can only come from world-class data.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and KnowlEdge (KE) therefore joined forces with the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), one of the six thematic information services provided by the EU’S Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. Under this contract, we integrated world-class data on climate into our Sustainable Asset Valuation (SAVi) tool.
C3S is operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and is home to the landmark Climate Data Store, which provides a single-entry point for continuously updated climate data and products on the past, present, and future. This data comes from satellite and in-situ observations and models.
IISD and KE integrated this data into our assessments to generate sophisticated SAVi analyses on the costs of climate-related risks and externalities. We applied this approach to four use cases of infrastructure projects in their design phase:
- New and upgraded housing and commercial developments in a proposed “eco-district” in Johannesburg, South Africa
- Stormwater management upgrades in a proposed “eco-district” in Johannesburg, South Africa
- A hydropower project in northern Tanzania
- Agroforestry and climate adaptation in Welkenraedt, Belgium
Along with providing valuations of these projects, the use cases can also inform the policy priorities of local and national policymakers as they seek to fulfil their national and international climate commitments.
The insights developed from these assessments show governments, investors, and project developers why low-carbon, resource-efficient, and climate-resilient infrastructure brings the most attractive returns to capital holders and the public alike.
This detailed report outlines how we have updated our SAVi model to incorporate Copernicus climate data. It includes a literature review and an in-depth overview of our analytical process for selecting and integrating climate indicators. The report also sets out how our SAVi assessments have improved as a result from using the cutting-edge climate data.
Interested in sector-specific analysis of how we are integrating Copernicus climate data?
Browse our reports on buildings, energy, irrigation, nature-based infrastructure (NBI), roads, and wastewater. The reports present a literature review on the impacts of climate on the specific sector and explain how we selected and integrated relevant data from the Copernicus Data Store into SAVi.