As climate change continues to impact areas of business and environmental factors around the world, companies are increasingly investing in the study and modelling of its potential damage to infrastructure. Looking to better understand the future costs associated with climate change, AT&T has announced their hiring of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to develop a tool to assist in predicting climate-related events and the associated costs on AT&T’s infrastructure, according to CNBC. With a target of 30 years, the tool is initially expected to focus on natural disasters from North Carolina to Florida, with eventual plans to extend the projections across the entire continental United States.
“The project enables us to get information that can help anticipate the impact of climate change up to 30 years in advance, with high-resolution climate models at the hyperlocal level and new data we can ingest into our system to gain more intelligence about what happens to our infrastructure going forward,” said Charlene Lake, chief sustainability officer and senior vice president for public affairs at AT&T to CNBC.
The company has a vested interest in this research: according to its statistics, natural disasters have cost AT&T $847 million since 2016. “It’s not only about where flooding happens today, but more importantly, where it happens tomorrow. The infrastructure we put in today will last over 25 years,” Scott Mair, President of Operations at AT&T told CNBC. “The more we know about what’s to come, the better options we have today.”
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