Program areas at 1st Street Foundation
Throughout the first half of 2022, the Foundation continued its partnership with the top academic and for-profit institutions in the field of wildfire, including the Pyregence Consortium, to create the first nationally available, high resolution, climate adjusted wildfire model that integrates information on fuels, wildfire weather, and ignition into a fire behavior model and applies that to every property parcel in the country. As the consumer facing website FloodFactor.com continued to gain traction in the beginning of 2022, the Foundation finalized its second major peril launch with the release of Fire Factor on May 16, 2022. Coinciding with that release, the Foundation's website migrated from FloodFactor.com to RiskFactor.com to account for the availability of multiple perils. Very quickly thereafter, the Foundation launched its third major climate peril in August 2022 with the release of Heat Factor. The Foundation enhanced and expanded its Flood Factor model to Version 2 and extended it beyond the contiguous United States to include Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico. This was released in April 2022. Simultaneously, the Foundation began its work on developing its fourth climate peril, Wind Factor. The Foundation finalized a partnership NASA in September 2022, to enhance climate risk modeling, promote applied science research, and more effectively communicate the risks of a changing climate. Through this partnership, NASA began receiving access to the Foundation's data and insights into its methodologies and the two groups will work together to further improve physical models and risk products related to floods, fires, heat and other climate-driven hazards. The goals of the collaboration are to quantify economic impacts from climate and promote climate risk awareness to individuals, communities and government agencies. The Foundation released two national reports: (1) "Fueling the Flames" on May 16, 2022 highlighting that wildfire has become one of the most common and dangerous climate perils, increasingly spreading from heavily forested areas to more populous urban and suburban environments; and (2) "Hazardous Heat" on August 15, 2022 highlighting the prevalence of increasing extreme temperatures and dangerous heat wave events throughout the contiguous United States. In October 2022, the Foundation launched an enhanced version of its RiskFactor.com tool with the addition of enterprise-level data and hazard layers directly on the customer facing site, as well as the ability to interact with the tool to adjust damage and downtime day estimates in real time based on building specific property characteristics. The Foundation also finalized a partnership with Crexi and Compass, two leading real estate portal websites, to have the Risk Factor data fully integrated into their platforms for all on- and off-market listings. These integrations were extremely significant as they ensured that millions of Americans were exposed to flood risk data on a daily basis, ensuring Americans were now able to incorporate climate adjusted flood risk into their home buying and selling process. The Foundation also partnered with several government agencies in 2022 to provide them climate risk data for internal risk analysis and policy decision-making, including Fannie Mae, the Federal Reserve Board and all 12 banks, Freddie Mac and others. Lastly, the Foundation partnered with several financial institutions and private businesses to further communicate climate risk to citizens, industry and government. Some notable examples of these license arrangements include Anderson Optimization, Cypress Creek Renewables, KPMG, Morningstar, Fifth Third Bank, Norges, Nuveen and others. The Foundation's revenue from data license agreements increased approximate ten-fold between 2021 and 2022.