Risk Scoring Methodology

1. Assessment Overview

ClimaInsight assesses climate physical risk for Canadian properties across three hazard types: flood, wildfire, and heat stress. Each property receives a per-hazard risk score (0.00 to 1.00) and a composite score that aggregates across all selected hazards.

Scores are derived from authoritative Canadian geospatial datasets and are designed for screening-level assessments at the postal code level.

2. Assessment Pipeline

Every assessment follows a three-step pipeline:

1. Geocoding — Resolve Canadian postal codes to geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude).
2. Hazard Overlay — Check each location against selected hazard datasets (raster sampling for flood, polygon intersection for wildfire and heat).
3. Risk Scoring — Convert raw hazard data into normalized risk scores, compute composite scores, and classify into risk categories.

3. Geocoding

Postal codes are resolved to latitude/longitude coordinates using a two-tier lookup:

1. Exact match — Full 6-character postal code lookup against a national geocoding dataset.
2. FSA fallback — If no exact match is found, the first 3 characters (Forward Sortation Area) are used for an approximate centroid location.

4. Flood Risk Scoring

Flood risk is assessed using the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) Flood Susceptibility Index (FSI) national raster dataset. The raster classifies all land in Canada into six susceptibility classes based on hydrological, topographic, and land cover factors.

FSI Class to Risk Score Mapping

How It Works

1. The geocoded coordinates (EPSG:4326) are reprojected to the raster's native coordinate system (EPSG:3979, NAD83 CSRS / Canada Atlas Lambert).
2. The raster pixel value at the reprojected location is sampled.
3. The pixel value (FSI class 1–6) is mapped to a continuous risk score using the table above.
4. Locations outside the raster coverage or on NoData pixels receive a score of 0.00.

5. Wildfire Risk Scoring

Wildfire risk is assessed using point-in-polygon spatial analysis against wildfire hazard zone boundaries.

How It Works

1. The geocoded location is tested against a set of wildfire hazard zone polygons.
2. If the point falls inside a polygon, the zone's severity level is assigned.
3. If a point falls within multiple zones, the highest severity is used.
4. If the point is outside all zones, the severity is "none" (score = 0.00).

Severity to Score Mapping

6. Heat Stress Risk Scoring

Heat stress risk uses the same point-in-polygon methodology as wildfire, applied against heat stress hazard zone polygons.

Severity to Score Mapping

7. Composite Score Calculation

The composite risk score provides a single aggregated measure across all selected hazards for a given property. ClimaInsight offers two approaches depending on the tier:

Starter Tier: Maximum Score

The composite score equals the highest individual hazard score across all selected hazards. This ensures that a property's overall risk is never diluted by low-risk hazards.

• If a property has flood = 0.70 and wildfire = 0.20, the composite score is 0.70 (not 0.45).
• If a property has flood = 0.90, wildfire = 0.50, and heat = 0.20, the composite score is 0.90.

Pro Tier: Weighted Average

Pro users can assign custom weights to each hazard type, reflecting the relative importance of each hazard for their specific portfolio or use case.

• Example: A coastal portfolio might weight flood at 50%, wildfire at 30%, and heat at 20%.
• With scores of flood = 0.70, wildfire = 0.50, heat = 0.20 and weights of 50/30/20: composite = (0.5×0.70 + 0.3×0.50 + 0.2×0.20) / 1.0 = 0.54.

8. Risk Categories

Both per-hazard and composite scores are classified into four risk categories based on the following thresholds:

9. Portfolio Summary

When multiple properties are assessed together, ClimaInsight generates a portfolio-level summary including:

• Average composite score — Mean composite score across all assessed properties.
• Maximum composite score — Highest composite score in the portfolio, identifying the most at-risk property.
• Category distribution — Count of properties in each risk category (Critical, High, Medium, Low).
• Per-hazard summary — For each hazard type: average score, maximum score, and number of properties located within a hazard zone.

The Starter tier supports up to 10 properties per assessment. The Pro tier supports up to 50 properties per assessment with additional portfolio analytics.

10. Data Sources

11. Limitations

• Screening-level assessment: Results are intended for initial screening and prioritization, not as a substitute for site-specific engineering assessments or insurance underwriting.
• Postal code precision: Starter tier geocoding uses postal code centroids, which may not reflect risk at a specific street address within the postal area.
• Static datasets: Hazard zone boundaries and the flood susceptibility raster represent conditions at their time of publication and may not reflect recent changes in land use, infrastructure, or climate conditions.
• Hazard weighting: The Starter tier uses a max-of-all approach which reflects the dominant hazard but does not capture combined multi-hazard exposure. Pro tier users can set custom weights for a more nuanced composite score.
• Canadian coverage only: All datasets are specific to Canada. Locations outside Canada will return no data.