Riskthinking.AI opens climate risk software to researchers worldwide

Riskthinking.AI is giving universities, research institutions and some nonprofit organizations free access to its Climate Digital Twin for non-commercial research. The move aims to create a shared technical standard for climate-risk analysis and lower the barrier to bank-grade climate data and computing tools.

Why it matters: - Climate-risk research is fragmented across vendors, taxonomies, hazard models and reporting workflows. - Riskthinking.AI says a shared standard can make climate analyses easier to compare, reproduce and audit. - Free access could give smaller and underfunded research groups the same infrastructure used by large financial institutions.

What happened: - Riskthinking.AI announced free access to its Climate Digital Twin, or CDT™, for universities, research institutions and scientists worldwide. - The access is available through CDTexpress for non-commercial research. - The company framed the rollout as part of a new Climate Risk Commons™ and an open technical standard called the Open Climate Risk Framework, or OCRF.

The details: - The Climate Risk Commons defines shared contracts, a reference pipeline, APIs, software development kits, data and tooling for climate-risk analysis. - The OCRF is designed so climate hazards, physical assets and impact functions can interoperate on the same architecture. - Riskthinking.AI says anyone can run the Commons end to end on open reference data. - The CDT uses a single standardized data model with more than 50 climate hazards. - The platform covers 241 billion geospatially aligned global locations across 193 countries. - CDTexpress includes all IPCC emissions scenarios and 15 time horizons running to 2100. - Researchers can upload open-source datasets, build their own pricing models and create their own impact functions. - The company says institutions that join the Climate Risk Commons can arrange automatic enrollment for bona fide students, researchers and faculty. - Those institutions can add and replace datasets, build and add models, and design and add damage functions. - Riskthinking.AI says the CDT is the same enterprise-grade infrastructure it provides to the world’s largest financial institutions, including the top 100 banks. - The platform is built to run thousands of distinct climate futures simultaneously and produce a full probability distribution instead of a single point estimate. - Riskthinking.AI says the system is used by banks, insurers, asset managers and financial data providers. - The company says the platform supports climate-risk disclosure, adaptation, portfolio risk, infrastructure resilience and insurance applications. - The company also points to uses such as flood and rainfall risk assessment for agricultural regions and hazard exposure analysis for informal settlements.

Between the lines: - The announcement is as much about standard-setting as software access. - Riskthinking.AI is trying to position its stack as common infrastructure for a field that still lacks a widely accepted technical layer. - The company is also signaling that climate-risk tools should be open to academic users who cannot afford enterprise budgets. - Dr. Ron Dembo, CEO and founder of Riskthinking.AI, said climate data lacked a common standard and that access, not science, has been the main barrier for researchers. - Dembo also said giving universities the same standardized pipeline as commercial clients is what a climate common means in practice.

What's next: - Researchers at universities, research institutions and some nonprofits can request CDT access directly from Riskthinking.AI. - Institutions that join the Climate Risk Commons can expand access across their students, researchers and faculty. - Riskthinking.AI is betting that open, shared infrastructure will speed up what it calls Climate 2.0 analysis. - The company says it wants that shift to happen across the field, not only at institutions with large budgets.

The bottom line: - Riskthinking.AI is using free academic access to promote a common climate-risk standard, and to put bank-grade tools into the hands of researchers worldwide.