Reducing Infrastructure Climate Risk Through Technology Measures: Data Infrastructure (IC50) 

This paper identifies the key strategies or actions that data infrastructure assets can take to decarbonise and build climate resilience. We give a high-level overview of influential approaches to achieve these aims that encompass a wide range of infrastructure assets. Our “top-down” approach focuses on the general properties of assets in major infrastructure sectors and explores which decarbonisation and climate resilience strategies may be effective in multiple sectors.

We aim to find the most material strategies for both decarbonisation and physical resilience and gauge their effectivity.

Our literature review identifies the most material strategies, and their associated key technologies, across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and four climate-related physical risks - floods, extreme wind, extreme heat, and wildfires - and assess their effectiveness at reducing emissions or damage respectively. These four have been chosen as they have proven to be the most common climate-related physical risks over the 20year period from 2000-2019 (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2020). 

We show how these strategies are relevant to the data infrastructure class, how they might differ between different types of data assets, and how they can best be employed by asset owners, filling a critical knowledge gap in the industry.