New PNAS Paper on the Need for Transparent Climate-Risk Research

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by Adam Pollack (now at the University of Iowa), argues that transparency is especially critical for climate-risk research—and that current practices fall short.

Most engineering products can be tested directly: a new material can be stress-tested regardless of whether its formula is secret. Climate risk estimates can’t. There’s no instrument that measures the probability of a 100-year flood, so when two models disagree—as they do for 76% of Los Angeles properties—we have no independent way to settle the question. Scrutiny of methods and assumptions is the only path to trust, yet only 4% of highly-cited climate-risk studies share both data and code.

The paper charts a course forward: climate-risk tools should be explainable, benchmarked, built on open foundations, and comparable across providers. Getting there will take more than good intentions from individual researchers—it requires institutional commitment to open science infrastructure.

See the full paper or the Dartmouth press release.