Climate IQ

A comprehensive multi-industry risk management tool that evaluates key KPIs to address the questions around a company’s exposure to climate change and in doing so help formulate strategic decisions in line with business needs and regulatory requirements.

The challlenge

Developing the Climate IQ tool, which has the capability to globally assess both physical and transitional climate risks on a bespoke or automated basis, presented several complex challenges:

Data Integration: Collate and integrate vast and diverse datasets from various sources, including climate models, economic indicators, infrastructure data, and more, is a formidable task. Ensuring the accuracy, timeliness, and compatibility of this data is essential.
Risk Modeling: Develop sophisticated risk models that accurately assess both physical and transitional climate risks involves complex mathematical and statistical modeling. These models must account for a wide range of variables and their interdependencies.
Accuracy and Precision: The tool has to provide highly accurate and precise risk assessments to be valuable to businesses, governments, and organisations. Minimising false positives and false negatives in risk predictions is a significant challenge.
Interdisciplinary Expertise: Climate IQ required a multidisciplinary team of experts, including climate scientists, data scientists, economists, and domain experts in various industries.
Communication of Results: Present complex risk assessments in an understandable and actionable manner to a diverse user base is a challenge. Data visualisation, reporting, and communication tools must be user-friendly and informative.

The approach

Designing the user experience and visual design concepts for the Climate IQ tool, required a user-centered approach to ensure usability, clarity, and effectiveness. Here's a framework of our UX research and visual design concepts:

Research:

• Conduct interviews, surveys, and workshops to understand user needs, pain points, and objectives. Identify what climate change risks mean to them and what information they require.

• Map out user journeys to understand how different personas interact with the platform at various touchpoints. Identify where they encounter challenges or seek specific information.

• Analyse existing climate risk analysis platforms to understand what works well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Wireframing and Prototyping:

• Begin with low-fidelity wireframes to outline the layout, structure, and flow of key pages and features. Focus on functionality and user interactions.

• Translate wireframes into high-fidelity interactive prototypes. Review these prototypes with stakeholders and product owners.

• Develop clear and informative data visualisation components, such as charts, graphs, and maps, to help users interpret climate risk data effectively.

Continuous Improvement:

• Implement analytics tools to monitor user behaviour and gather insights into how users interact with the platform. Use this data to make informed improvements.

• Regularly update the platform to incorporate the latest climate models, research findings, and evolving risk factors.

The outcome

Climate IQ can now assess exposure to physical risks of climate hazards, as well as the economic impacts of the transition to a low-carbon state on a bespoke or an automated basis including:

Data simplification and selection of scenarios to assess metrics that matter most to the business
Impact of different risks on selected performance indicators
Analysis of the rate of change of various risks under different time horizons and severity thresholds
Macro-economic impact trend analysis