Black & Veatch: Build Business Resilience with Climate-Adaptive Infrastructure

OVERLAND PARK, KS / ACCESSWIRE / January 27, 2023 / As climate change supercharges hurricanes, flooding and drought, U.S. businesses realize the potentially high cost of vulnerability, with flooding a prime example. According to a study by First Street Foundation and Arup, about 730,000 U.S. retail, office and multi-unit residential properties are at risk of flood damage. The potential structural damage associated with this probabilistic flooding is $13.5 billion, and lost working days could total 3 million. Compounding matters is that local economies would lose nearly $50 billion due to lost business output and indirect impacts that create cascading effects down the economic chain.

Foto: Accesswire

While worst-case scenarios are ominous, the global community amplified the use of clean renewable energy and electric vehicles in 2022, which slashed carbon emission totals. Doing their part, companies are developing climate-adaptive, sustainable business models. Black & Veatch recommends they integrate resilience into their infrastructure and across their operational culture, starting with these five targeted actions:

1. Manage climate vulnerability
Climate analytics help enterprises identify the likelihood of climate hazards and the resulting impacts on their operations. With this knowledge, businesses prioritize funding towards adapting or mitigating their buildings, systems or functions to the predicted risk.

Recently, Black & Veatch evaluated how hurricanes, tropical storms and tropical depressions could damage infrastructure belonging to a major East Coast utility. In-house meteorologists studied 70 years of tropical systems and developed a tropical "storm scale" that measured storm intensity, overall aerial coverage, flooding and impacts on the utility's service territory. Black & Veatch used a combined total scoring index for this data to develop a recurrence interval for the utility's current service area. This comprehensive analysis resulted in the 20-year storm damage index modeled with historical storm cost analysis.

The utility is using the final storm reserve analysis to understand its vulnerability, inform adaptation and mitigation efforts, and plan financially for the potential costs of climate change. Businesses can reduce their exposure with a similar application.

2. Decarbonize energy and reduce water consumption
In the U.S., the commercial sector accounts for 12 percent of the total energy consumption, and some commercial facilities such as data centers use a whopping 3 to 5 million gallons of water per day. It's no surprise that businesses often focus on resource reduction and decarbonization to cut costs, build resilience and decrease their impact on the environment. With the right engineering alchemy, many technologies can provide compound benefits in one application.