Azavea lands $1.5M federal grant to work on climate change tool

The federal government just made another investment in an Azavea product — one that deals with the impact of climate change.
The Callowhill mapping company, which has historically been a professional services firm but has developed four products, won a $1.5 million federal grant to develop a set of tools that aims to show how climate change will affect communities. It’s an effort to make the problem of climate change relatable and actionable. Instead of speaking about things like “sea level rise” and “weather volatility,” the tool shows the probability of extreme storms and water shortages.
Azavea previously won a $225,000 federal grant to work on this product.
Four people work on the climate forecaster right now, but Azavea founder Robert Cheetham said he expects to hire sales staffers for it in the next year and a half. Possible customers include governments, utilities and insurance companies, he said.
Most of Azavea’s products have been developed with the support of federal grants, like predictive crime tool HunchLab, which Philadelphia uses, and tree mapping tool OpenTreeMap.