Client: Colorado Water Conservation Board
The Future Avoided Cost Explorer (FACE:Hazards) is a visualisation tool commissioned by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) in partnership with other state and federal agencies in the US to help communities in Colorado examine the economic risks of climate change.
The FACE:Hazards explorer displays results from a detailed study into flood, drought and wildfire risks in a warming climate. This is presented as an interactive dashboard to help inform preparedness and resilience policies, support recovery and adaptation investments, and provide decision-makers with tools to quantify the growing cost of inaction. It empowers communities to justify mitigation and adaptation investments using climate and risk-informed decisions.
FACE:Hazards measures the current and future impacts from flood, drought and wildfire across multiple sectors of Colorado’s economy. County-level damages are analyzed under current and 2050 climate and population conditions to explore the effects of unmitigated development and increased hazard intensity on certain economies.
In collaboration with Lynker scientists we developed an interactive dashboard using Tableau to explore how flood, drought, and wildfire may cause economic damages under a variety of climate and population scenarios. Using this dashboard the user can adjust population and climate scenarios and visualise spatially and in economic terms the impacts of all of the hazard categories.
We also developed a series of Esri storymaps that explain the methods used in the study including
1. An overview of the overall approach
2. Approach summary for flood
3. Approach summary for drought
4. Approach summary for wildfire
These pages include information on how we calculated expected annual damages for each of the sectors. For example we used a model that computed crop production based on drought severity for all counties producing corn, wheat, hay, or sorghum.
The FACE:Hazards tool is important to Colorado because, until now, the State of Colorado did not have a tool to quantify future risk to climate hazards or the potential savings from strategic resilience. By creating this web-based, climate data-informed explorer, local governments can inquire, evaluate, and prioritize investments today to reduce economic vulnerabilities over the next three decades.
Deliverables:
Interactive tableau dashboard
Summary of method storymaps
FACE:Hazards graphic language