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Gro Expands Climate Risk Assessment Suite With New Water Stress Scoring

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Gro has launched a new Climate Indicator for Water Stress (GCI - Water Stress) to help companies, financial institutions, and governments better manage and respond to risk in water-stress-prone areas around the world. 

Water stress occurs when there is high competition among users, causing demand for water to exceed water availability. High water stress can be caused by low water supply and high demand, but it can also occur when water supply is high. In a high water supply situation, water demand can still be higher, resulting in high water stress.

The GCI - Water Stress measures the ratio between water withdrawals (demand) and water availability (supply) across watersheds worldwide to show the amount of water stress globally, as well as at the national, district, or watershed levels for a more granular view. 

Accessible through Gro’s Climate Risk Navigator Application and the Gro API, the GCI - Water Stress provides water stress data scored on a 0-5 scale, where 0 represents low water stress and 5 represents high water stress. Higher water stress values indicate more competition among users, and low water stress values indicate there is enough water available for the users in that area. 

With this information,

  • Companies can assess which assets or production-specific facilities are in water-stress prone areas to improve corporate reporting and better manage supply chain risk. 
  • Supranational, or national, state, and regional governments can see regions under their jurisdiction that are high water-stress areas to correlate with other economic factors or to target specific funding programs.
  • Investors and portfolio managers can evaluate which companies are concentrated in areas with high water stress, as well as study new decisions that companies are making, such as where they build new factories, to see if those are areas where water stress is high. 

Gro provides both an actual water stress score - which represents baseline water stress values directly from the data source calculated at the watershed level - as well as Gro’s unique weighted average water stress score, which takes actual water stress score values and averages these values across Gro’s regions. The GCI - Water Stress score can additionally be weighted by the asset selected by the user, such as power plants or transportation, to show which assets would be most affected by water stress.

Water stress, as it considers both water supply as well as demand, differs fundamentally from drought measurements provided by the Gro Drought Index, which only measures water supply. In addition, the GCI - Water Stress provides a static, average value over a large time interval, whereas the GDI value represents dynamic values that update every day.

The GCI - Water Stress complements Gro’s existing climate risk assessment analytics, which allows customers to forecast the impact of various climate risks - from drought to excessive rainfall - on infrastructure, crop-growing regions, or other assets. It can be additionally used with Gro’s Land Suitability Model to indicate which regions most suitable for growing certain crops have water stress risks.

Contact a member of our team to see how to leverage the GCI - Water Stress to meet your business needs.

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