Make climate risk accessible, easy to understand and actionable for individuals, governments, and industry.
A changing climate is impacting the risks facing American properties, communities, and businesses as perils like flood, fire, heat, and drought become more common, and more severe. Currently the best science highlighting the issue is complex, happening in silos, and left in peer review journals, and there is no accurate way for individuals to understand how environmental changes will impact them personally. We solved this for flood with Flood Factor but flood alone is not enough. Home’s across the country are at risk from multiple perils and that risk is only growing with each passing year. There were 20 events last year that each caused more than a billion dollars in damage. That’s why we launched RiskFactor.com
United States Billion Dollar Disasters By Year (Unadjusted)
Cost values are in billions of dollars
First Street Foundation is a non-profit research and technology group dedicated to quantifying and communicating those risks by incorporating world class modeling techniques and analysis with the most up to date science available in order to simply, and effectively, inform Americans of their risk today and into the future from all environmental changes.
What makes First Street Foundation unique
- Custom built models to calculate property-level climate risk statistics
- Transparent, peer-reviewed methodology that’s proven against real environmental events
- Validated by millions of users every day who continuously improve the data and science
- Easy-to-understand experience that’s trusted by industry leaders
- Building details and structure characteristics are used to customize information each specific property
Institutional real estate investors and insurers have long had access to environmental risk data from for-profit oligopolies who use non-transparent methodologies that do not advance science and which limit access to risk information for the country. Because of this, the majority of Americans have relied on sources such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the United States Forest Service, and other public agencies to understand their risk. However, these agencies are not tasked with defining risk for individual properties, do not consider how environmental changes impact that risk in the near-term future, and are often unable to incorporate the latest science due to the bureaucratic and regulatory restrictions within which they operate, leaving millions of households and property owners unaware of their true risk.
There has long been an urgent need for accurate, property-level, publicly available environmental risk information in the United States based on open source, peer reviewed science. In a mission to fill that need, First Street Foundation has built a team of leading modelers, researchers, and data scientists to develop the first comprehensive, publicly available risk models in the United States. Beginning with flood, moving on to wildfire, and now extreme heat, First Street works to correct the asymmetry of information in the market, empowering Americans to protect their most valuable asset–their home while working with industry and government entities to inform them of their risk.
People can freely access property-specific flood, wildfire, and extreme heat risk information for 145 million US properties at Risk Factor. The Foundation’s data is also leveraged by industry and governments and used for critical analysis of the potential impact of these climate perils on infrastructure; mortgage and housing market inefficiencies; government spending and taxes; and vulnerable communities. Roughly 200 of the world’s top academic researchers from 45 of the country’s leading universities, including Harvard, Wharton, Johns Hopkins, and MIT, have partnered with the First Street Foundation Research Lab to analyze the data.
Highlights From "Hazardous Heat"
The 6th National Risk Assessment: Hazardous Heat identifies the impact of increasing temperatures at a property level, and how the frequency, duration, and intensity of extremely hot days will change over the next 30 yea...
The 5th National Risk Assessment: Fueling the Flames provides a first of its kind analysis of the risk individual properties face from damaging wildfires today, and up to 30 years in the future as a result of climate cha...
A new national report from the First Street Foundation that analyzes the economic impact of underestimated flood risk to properties throughout the United States.
Historically, determining a property’s flood risk was an onerous process — in some cases, potential buyers would have no idea a property was in a flood zone until it was flagged by the mortgage company prior to closing, or in some cases not at all. By surfacing this information upfront, consumers can avoid surprises and have all the information they need to make informed decisions and feel confident about the home buying process.