It’s not just floods and fires: This AI forecasts how climate change will impact your city

If you buy a house in Miami or Phoenix in 2022, what will it be worth in five years or ten years as climate change progresses? A new tech platform, Climate Alpha, uses a “scenario forecaster” to help answer that question—and to help predict where it might make sense to invest instead.

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“People are still moving to Miami, and they don’t care about the climate,” he says. “So you have to model human behavior, and you have to look at lots of factors beyond climate.” It’s not as simple as saying that because the sea level is rising, property values will drop; the platform uses machine learning and proprietary algorithms to look at hundreds of variables. It includes products like “Climate Price,” an estimate of property value in the future, “Resilience Index,” a dashboard that compares locations by their vulnerability and adaptation, and “Alpha Finder,” which lets users enter criteria to get an analysis of where to buy.

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Governments can also use the tools to help plan where to invest for climate migration, and where to encourage people to move. “My belief is that we should use this technology to identify those locations that meet the criteria for livability—affordability, space, lower cost, building zero energy homes, high share of renewable energy in the grid, clean air, and proximity to certain infrastructure—and to ‘pre-design’ the settlement of the future.”

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