Ottawa: Risk Sciences International, an Ottawa-based company specializing in providing advice and technical solutions for risk management, unveiled their answer to Canada's climate change adaptation strategy April 13 – the Climate Change Hazards Information Portal (CCHIP). CCHIP is a web-based tool designed to help empower organizations to integrate climate change impacts into their decisions, to protect infrastructure, resources and public health.
CCHIP's algorithms use data from 40 of the most recent Global Climate Models (GCMs), as well as many other sources, to provide defensible, actionable conclusions about options across a whole array of climate and severe weather-related conditions. By tailoring this information for specific locations and sectors, CCHIP is intended to help planners, engineers and decision makers account for future climate change impacts.
The most significant advance of CCHIP is in the provision of climate change data, which when accessed through an easy-to-use web portal, gives smaller organizations and individuals the ability to generate information of immediate applicability to planning decisions.
"CCHIP makes climate data accessible to a greater cross-section of Canadian society than ever before," said Daniel Krewski, CEO, Risk Sciences International. "What was once at the finger-tips of a select few groups across Canada is now within reach of a much larger cross-section of communities, organizations, and other groups interested in building the projections of climate change models, and other important climate change indicators, into their planning and infrastructure decisions."
CCHIP reflects industry-specific needs and priorities; it is informed, for example, by the climate information required by users of the National Model Building Code of Canada, the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code, design standards for overhead electricity transmission and communication towers, and dam safety guidelines.
Visit cchip.ca for details. For more information about RSI visit http://www.risksciences.com.