When modern companies, governments, or non-governmental organizations try to seriously assess climate and natural risks today, they rarely cite the absolute lack of data as the first problem. In fact, it is The problem is something else – the practical side of things and orientation. Relevant resources are often scattered across countless websites, government portals, long PDF documents and fragmented catalogs. In addition, while there are many powerful commercial solutions, many of them do not offer a so-called „freemium“ approach, i.e. the possibility of trying out basic functions for free. This makes it extremely difficult for organizations to get a solid overview before they allocate significant financial budgets for these purposes.

A new initiative called CRI Tool Hub. It is an innovative platform that brings together open-access tools and datasets for advanced climate risk assessment in one place. The Hub brings together high-quality and freely available resources from leading global institutions such as the IPCC, NASA and the World Resources Institute and transforms them into a clear, easily searchable structure. The platform was created in expert collaboration with Christian Woerl and Christian Wiener from the AI think tank for climate and resilience CLIMATE+TECH. The basic idea of this project is highly pragmatic: the goal was not to build another new, isolated software, but to make it accessible and easy to find, compare and immediately use existing, excellent solutions.

What does the platform offer in practice?

Currently, CRI Tool Hub brings more than 100 open-access tools and resources, covering up to 13 categories of physical hazards. These categories include, for example, critical events such as floods, extreme heat, severe storms, droughts and large-scale forest fires. The platform has global coverage, while offering a particularly high depth of local detail for some geographical areas such as Europe, Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The core of the Tool Hub is its function as an orientation and selection tool. It seamlessly guides users from the initial thought „we need to do something about climate risks“ to the concrete result, where they receive a list of the right open-source tools for their assessment. Its key functionalities include:

• Advanced search and filtering: Users can sort instruments by type, risk category, time frame (historical data or future projections), and geography, eliminating the biggest time loss that occurs not in the analysis itself, but in the initial discovery of what data even exists.
• Tool cards with brief descriptions: Each resource is presented as a simple card with a summary, intended use, scope of coverage, and a direct link to access. This seemingly small detail turns hours of tedious browsing through open browser tabs into a task that can be started in less than 5 minutes.
• Saving favorites: The ability to create your own project "toolkits", for example, for a specific supply chain audit or internal reporting project.

Thanks to these features, users will discover tools from various fields in the Hub. These include: IPCC Interactive Atlas for understanding regional climate change, a system for global forest fire monitoring NASA FIRMS, WRI Aqueduct for rapid water stress screening, or open-source software CLIMATE from the ETH Zurich institute for modeling climate risks and calculating expected financial losses for assets at risk.

Removing barriers to organizations and scientific communication

The main obstacle to modern climate risk management is no longer a lack of data, but „lack of usability and access.“ Geospatial data is still a big unknown for many corporate teams, and the capacity to navigate complex software is simply lacking. The Tool Hub therefore acts as a starting point with an extremely low barrier to entry, delivering valuable time savings and methodological clarity.

The tools are ideal for quickly screening locations for threat exposure and help re-structure internal discussions about risk materiality before moving on to more complex analytical steps. Last but not least, the platforms serve as Copernicus Climate Trace for effective scientific communication - visual maps and indicators help management understand threats faster, without each company having to build its own research department.

Looking to the Future: Growing Infrastructure

The CRI Tool Hub was designed as constantly expanding infrastructure, not just as a static list of internet links. In the future, it is planned to increase the local and sectoral depth, as data from national research institutes are often more relevant for decision-making than global sets. The tools will also gradually be supplemented with practical guides, templates for documenting results and process manuals.

In the long term, the Hub should evolve into a collaborative network and comprehensive data infrastructure for technical teams. Practitioners will be able to design new tools for integration, and the platform will enable direct download of underlying datasets (such as CMIP6 derived climate parameters) for internal reuse within organizations.

Climate and natural risks are becoming strategic and operational priorities for more and more organizations, but the entry point for their analysis has remained unnecessarily difficult. The CRI Tool Hub platform successfully removes this obstacle by makes risk assessment accessible, understandable and immediately usable for everyone. JRi&CO2AI