What are the long-term benefits of investing in climate intelligence beyond reporting?

Cervest’s climate intelligence (CI) product, EarthScan™ is offered as a SaaS product, meaning business leaders get access to insight into the physical climate risks facing their assets on demand. Reports can be created and updated at any time, without having to commission and pay for updates from a consultant.

As the use cases for climate intelligence grow, so do the long-term benefits to EarthScan. Our Head of Customer Success EMEA, Jon Liddell, highlights why you should include climate intelligence in your ESG budget in 2023 and beyond.

With EarthScan, business leaders get access to our team of climate and earth scientists, who can answer any specific physical climate-related questions – for a more thorough insight into future climate change and deeper risk analysis. We also offer continuous support via our customer success team, so as your organization adapts to climate change, and discovers more and more through our product, we are always available to help.

With our clients, we have distinct stages for their different life cycles. We always start with the implementation and onboarding phase with a comprehensive implementation call. This means that we gain deep knowledge about what your organization wants to achieve, which assets you will be screening (whether they are owned assets or belong to a supply chain partner). We make sure that the key users of EarthScan are aware of the full benefits of the product, including which custom fields they may wish to include, which particular insights will be most useful, and how to filter results to prioritize actions.

Organizations need decision-useful insights to unify multiple teams, departments and regions around a shared source of truth. By building a full picture of climate risk, sustainability leaders, risk managers and analysts alike can identify the risks and opportunities across their built assets.

After the initial implementation call, we broaden our reach to train other users of EarthScan, tailoring the training to each specific goal and use case across the business. We support everyone in becoming climate intelligence champions, across all departments and locations.

Once this is complete, we can create a personalized success plan with objectives by month and clear goals for each department or individual user.

The benefit of ongoing access to EarthScan is that we can offer granular information on properties or assets that are, or will be at risk. Organizations can then use these insights to inform every business decision, from taking targeted and effective interventions to reduce climate risk, to enhancing TCFD-aligned disclosures or avoiding expensive insurance premiums.

These assessments can be extended to third-party assets such as supply chains and pre-transaction due diligence across potential mergers and acquisitions.

As the portfolio of assets our clients rely on expands, they can create new portfolios, or add to existing portfolios to immediately get insight on additional assets. Multiple portfolios can be created and compared, to see how overall physical risk would vary depending on the asset mix being considered. Getting multiple reports from a consultant for this purpose would be costly and likely take time. With on demand access to EarthScan, this can be done in minutes.

An increasing number of countries across the world are beginning to implement mandatory rules for the disclosure of physical climate risks such as the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) in the UK. This may be an annual requirement, but as stakeholders, customers and employees are increasingly interested in the sustainability efforts of companies they work with, the need for more frequent climate-related reports will increase. Our clients use EarthScan to include climate-related physical risk in a huge range of regular reporting and decision-making to ensure they are up to date with changes in our climate and our platform updates.

As a SaaS company, we are constantly working to improve our product. From adding new signals such as wildfire danger, to updates that improve decision usefulness such as our recently introduced improved rating system. EarthScan users get the benefit of each of our improvements as soon as they go live, meaning they always have on-demand access to the most accurate and useful information about the physical risk facing their asset portfolios.

The benefits are numerous: a subscription provides all the climate intelligence and personalized information from our scientists, plus continuous support. Ultimately, our ongoing subscription offers clients a high level of customization and intel – while they focus on the changes they need to make across the business. After all, acting now is the only way.

Find out how business leaders are already using climate intelligence from EarthScan in our ebook - Powering action with climate intelligence.