Water Utility Climate Alliance
Understanding Climate Risks
Understanding climate risks and impacts is essential for identifying vulnerabilities, evaluating potential consequences, and making informed adaptation and resilience decisions. The resources on this page are WUCA products designed to provide practical insights and frameworks that can help utilities better understand how climate change may affect their operations, infrastructure, water supplies, customers, and communities. By building a stronger understanding of climate risks and impacts, utilities can establish a solid foundation for prioritizing actions, developing adaptation strategies, and strengthening long-term resilience.
IT’S HOT, AND GETTING HOTTER: Implications of Extreme Heat on Water Utility Staff and Infrastructure
Water utilities across the country will experience new and enhanced vulnerabilities due to future increases in extreme heat events stemming from climate change. This study analyzes the impact of such extreme temperature events on critical water utility physical infrastructure assets and personnel.
This project developed a comprehensive, enterprise-level framework for understanding the exposure and sensitivities of water utility business functions to a changing climate in order to accelerate mainstreaming of climate considerations into utility management.
This supplemental guidebook provides further details into the Mapping Climate Exposure and Climate Information Needs to Water Utility Business Functions framework steps, examples of how the framework was implemented by Denver Water and SFPUC, and templates that business function leads can use as they work through the framework.
This paper provides a brief overview of how changing perceptions of climate risk are affecting bond rating agencies and the insurance industry. It poses questions for utilities as they consider how climate change impacts creditworthiness, insurance coverage, and municipal bond buyers.
This survey was designed to expand understanding of how climate risks and extreme weather events are likely to affect built assets and infrastructure, and how utilities are responding by building new infrastructure, replacing or repairing assets, and changing operations.