The 11 most-loved EarthScan features of 2022, as chosen by customers

At Cervest, we made improvements to our rating system with Cervest Ratings™: a system designed to meet the market’s demand for globally standardized risk ratings to be used in reporting, prioritization and benchmarking. We also introduced wildfire to our climate hazards, enabling customers to screen for Wildfire Danger across thousands of assets, and released a suite of new time-saving features to our CI product, EarthScan™.

Here are 11 of the most-loved EarthScan features of 2022, as chosen by our customers and partners.

This year, our asset catalog reached a new milestone: 500 million discoverable assets in EarthScan. Customers use the asset catalog to instantly locate assets and add them to their portfolio in a couple of clicks, allowing them to screen the climate risks facing the assets they own, manage or rely on, on-demand.

In April 2022, we introduced custom fields to EarthScan. This is a powerful way for customers to analyze and segment their assets and portfolios. Up to 10 custom fields can be created when uploading a CSV file of assets to EarthScan, and then used to divide assets into sections, for example by lease length, rent or location. Insights on these segments can then be shared with relevant stakeholders to support risk management plans.

Standardized Cervest Ratings allow for comparison and benchmarking of operational risk to different sections of their portfolios, allowing for prioritization and robust adaptation planning.

In September, we launched Cervest Ratings: the next evolution of our ratings methodology for climate-related risk. This globally comparable rating system grades assets for their exposure to climate risk, from A (Very Low Climate-Related Risk) to F (Extremely High Climate-Related Risk) at the asset and portfolio level.

This enables automated reporting on assets considered at ‘material’ risk (Cervest Rating C and above), plus the ability to see underlying risk metrics, such as consecutive heatwave days or flooding inundation levels, at the asset level. This gives sustainability leaders the intel they need to go into client or stakeholder conversations with confidence and make informed decisions to build asset resilience.

What’s more, EarthScan customers are able to screen thousands of assets simultaneously for the greatest risks and opportunities when selecting ‘Combined Physical Risk’ from EarthScan’s list of risk categories.

EarthScan includes six climate hazards: flooding (coastal and riverine), wind, heat stress, precipitation, drought and wildfire. While flooding was the most searched-for climate hazard in 2022, the most-loved feature remains EarthScan’s unique Combined Physical Risk category.

Combined Physical Risk calculates risk exposure across all six climate hazards. This enables the quick identification of risks across portfolios of up to 5000 assets so that customers can quickly prioritize their climate-related risks, discover the risk category distribution beneath the overall rating and create targeted risk adaptation plans to reduce future revenue loss.

The Compare workspace in EarthScan. This enables customers to compare one portfolio against another to see the relative climate risk, from the overall Cervest Rating right down to the risk distribution.

EarthScan customers use the new Compare workspace to:

• Benchmark portfolios against known competitor assets to identify strengths and weaknesses

• Assess the impact of a new acquisition on a portfolio by creating two portfolios, with and without the new asset, and analyzing the differences between them

• Evaluate risk across two supply chain portfolios to diversify risk, minimize future operational disruption and protect future revenue loss

• Create subsets (Global vs. Highest Risk) when using the Segment Portfolio by Cervest Rating feature, for instance, to examine the highest risk warehouses in relation to the warehouse portfolio and share these priority assets with risk managers

Risk managers use the Cervest Rating filter to create subsets of larger global portfolios to prioritize assets for risk adaptation and flag to the asset owner. Likewise, asset managers and investors can identify the greatest opportunities in their pre-transaction portfolios, narrowing their search to assets rated only low or very low climate-related risk.

Other customers developed a point-in-time snapshot of their portfolios. Using their EarthScan controls, they developed highly specialized portfolios such as ‘Extremely High to High Climate-Related Risk (Coastal Flooding and Wind) in 2035’ – taking advantage of our IPCC Emission Scenario feature to showcase the best and worst-case scenario to decision-makers.

The most popular emission scenario used in EarthScan was the Paris-aligned scenario. The in-product Navigation Panel allows EarthScan users to discover climate risk across three emission scenarios (including Business as Usual and 2040 Emissions Peak) at any five-year time step between 1970 and 2100, across 500 million assets, simultaneously.

Assigning a dollar amount to climate change is one of the most significant drivers of risk adaptation. This year, EarthScan introduced climate value-at-risk insights that estimate the impact of physical climate risk on value, helping customers demonstrate the cost of climate change at the asset level. Like all other insights in EarthScan, these CVaR insights are science-backed, cross-referenceable and easily shareable.

Trust is another key factor in building internal buy-in, which is why every EarthScan insight also comes automatically cited. Throughout 2022, EarthScan customers have been citing insights to bring cross-referenceable asset-level intelligence into annual summaries, ESG reports, presentations, disclosures and more.

In August 2022, EarthScan introduced the ability to download insights not only as images or PDFs but also as CSV files, allowing climate insights to be integrated into existing workflows, reports and more.

Customers and partners also explored new ways to understand and integrate their asset-level insights, including average hazard exposure risk and the geographical distribution of assets at material risk.

With so many incomparable reports and spreadsheets sitting on hard drives, it’s more important than ever to unify stakeholders with a single, shareable source of truth. Transparency is vital to establish ESG as a function across multiple departments, regions, time zones and company subsidiaries.

EarthScan’s digital dashboard is intuitive for all users of all levels of climate fluency, and accessible wherever the team is logging in. The permission-based setting enables customers to share CI insights with confidence, showcase portfolios to clients and reveal, at the asset level, the risks and opportunities across thousands of assets and portfolios.

If you’re looking to disclose your climate risk alongside your annual summary next year, get internal buy-in on your risk adaptation strategy and build asset resilience to safeguard revenue, now is the time to act.

Download our free ebook to find out how EarthScan can power climate action.