bnr-Climate-Change-Readiness-Assessment-and-Action-Plan
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Climate Readiness Assessment and Action Plan

By assessing risks to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) assets and infrastructure, WSP helped SMUD evaluate current mitigation measures, identify priorities for additional actions, and gauge its current state of climate readiness.

 

Location

  • Sacramento, California, USA

Client

  • Sacramento Municipal Utility District

Project Status

  • Completed in 2016

Collaborative Approach

By assessing risks to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) assets and infrastructure, WSP helped SMUD evaluate current mitigation measures, identify priorities for additional actions, and gauge their current state of climate readiness. Our efforts engaged internal stakeholders to formally launch the climate readiness planning process and empower stakeholders to contribute to the process. The early engagement ensured that stakeholders’ concerns were fully captured and reflected in the research agenda. The discussions helped frame the analysis and set the parameters for how findings were ultimately presented.

 

Strategic Advice, Technical Expertise

Our team conducted a regionally-specific literature review to evaluate projected climate change impacts and their potential risks to SMUD assets, operations and customers. Each risk was evaluated based on the severity of its consequences and likelihood of happening, providing a matrix that illustrated the impacts of greatest concern. This matrix was used as the basis for characterizing an action plan that included community engagement, enterprise risk mitigation strategies, capital projects and operational initiatives. Our findings were compiled into a comprehensive report that provided an overview of SMUD’s climate readiness posture and positioned it as a leader within the utility sector by improving transparency and performance.

Public disclosure and transparency

We produced a comprehensive climate readiness assessment and strategy report that SMUD submitted to meet its commitment to the U.S. Department of Energy Partnership for Energy Sector Resilience. The work is serving as the foundation for incorporating climate change risk into SMUD’s enterprise risk dashboard.

 

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