Episode 492: SPECIAL EPISODE - Using Climate Risk Data to Drive Decision Making

In this special episode of the REIT Report, part of an ongoing series, “Building Resilience,” covering issues facing the REIT industry as it remains focused on investing for the long term, Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at  First Street Foundation , joins Nareit’s Jessica Long, senior vice president of environmental stewardship and sustainability, to discuss how high-resolution climate models are helping people to understand property-specific impacts from different weather events and to develop and implement adaptation plans.  “One of the ways in which we've thought about climate risk is a one-in-a-100-year event, which implies that if I just had a one-in-a-100-year flood, I don't have to worry about another one, I'm not going to live to be 100 years old. That's not actually how they work,” Porter explains. “Understanding that every year there's an independent opportunity for that probability of an event to occur, so if you look out over the 30 years of a standard residential mortgage, a 1% chance of flooding every year means that over those 30 years, you have a 26% chance of flooding. And so suddenly you're saying, wow, I have over a quarter chance of flooding over the lifetime of my mortgage.”