Voyager module: Four steps to a complete climate risk assessment of your property portfolio

A common concern we hear from real estate companies going into climate risk assessment for the first time: "We don't have the expertise to do this properly."

It's an understandable reaction. The EU Taxonomy, CSRD, and climate adaptation frameworks can feel like territory that belongs to specialists — consultants, engineers, climate scientists. Not sustainability managers or asset managers with a full plate of other responsibilities.

But here's what the regulation actually says: a proper climate risk assessment is a combination of data and historical knowledge about the buildings. Not one or the other. Both.

That means the people best positioned to do this assessment aren't outside consultants. They're the people who have managed these properties for years, know which basement floods after heavy rain, know which roofs have been repaired after storms, and know which tenants have raised concerns about water damage. That's your team.

What you've been missing isn't expertise. It's a structured process for turning that knowledge into documented, compliant risk assessments. That's what Voyager is built for.

The four-step process

Voyager follows a four-phase methodology aligned with the EU Taxonomy Regulation and the Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) requirements. Each step builds on the previous one, moving from automated data analysis toward your team's direct input and judgment.

Step 1: Pre-screening

Voyager starts by automatically screening your portfolio against a full set of climate hazards — flooding, landslides, storm surge, coastal flooding, quick clay, storm damage, and more.

For each property, it checks whether the hazard is geographically relevant. Hazards that simply don't apply to a location are filtered out. The ones that remain are flagged for further assessment.

You don't do anything in this step. Voyager does it automatically, using authoritative public data from sources like NVE, DSB, Kartverket, MET Norway, and Copernicus. The result is a shortlist of the hazards that are actually worth assessing for each property.

Step 2: Hazard exposure assessment

For the hazards that passed pre-screening, Voyager now determines how exposed each property is — using the same geographic and climate data. Each hazard is assigned an exposure level: Not exposed, Very low, Low, Medium, High, or Very high.

This is still automated. The data tells you whether the property is in a flood zone, near a quick clay area, in a storm-prone coastal location, and so on.

At the end of step 2, you have a clear picture of what your portfolio is exposed to and how severely. This is where the Telescope risk score comes from — a composite of exposure levels, weighted by the financial consequences historically associated with each hazard.

Step 3: Vulnerability assessment

This is where your knowledge comes in.

Exposure tells you that a hazard is present. Vulnerability tells you how much it actually matters for this specific building. And that depends on sensitivity — how strongly the building is affected by that hazard given its construction, age, location within the site, drainage, and so on.

Voyager presents the exposure data and asks your team to assess sensitivity for each relevant hazard — using a simple scale selection. One question per hazard. It takes minutes, not a technical analysis.

A new building with modern drainage might be far less sensitive to surface flooding than an older one with a below-grade entrance. Two properties can have identical exposure levels but very different vulnerabilities — and only the people who know those buildings can make that call.

Vulnerability is calculated as a combination of exposure and sensitivity. Where vulnerability is low, you can move on. Where it's high, you go to step 4.

Step 4: Impact and likelihood analysis

This is the most hands-on step — and the most valuable for regulatory documentation.

For each high-vulnerability hazard, your team assesses: what would actually happen if this hazard occurred? Voyager provides AI-generated consequence suggestions as a starting point — descriptions of how flooding, storms, or landslides could affect the building — but your team reviews, adjusts, and confirms them based on what you actually know.

For each potential impact, you assess two things: consequence (financial and material, health and safety, building life cycle) and likelihood (unlikely, possible, or likely over the building's lifetime). The combination gives you a risk level — low, medium, or high — for each impact.

The result is a fully documented climate risk assessment that reflects both data and your team's direct knowledge of the asset. This is precisely what the EU Taxonomy asks for.

Why this process requires your knowledge — not a consultant's

If you've considered hiring a consultant to handle climate risk assessments, it's worth understanding what that process would actually look like.

A consultant working to EU Taxonomy standards would follow the same four-step methodology. Steps 1 and 2 they could handle independently — the data analysis is the same regardless of who runs it. (In fact, these two automated steps are exactly what the Screening module delivers as a standalone tool for banks and insurers.) But steps 3 and 4 require information about the buildings that only your team has. They would need to sit with your asset managers, learn the history of each property, understand which buildings have known vulnerabilities, and document your team's knowledge in a structured format.

In other words: the assessment still depends on you. The consultant just adds a layer of process — and cost — on top of knowledge that already exists inside your organisation.

Voyager gives you that structure directly, without the intermediary. Your team works through the process itself, supported by data, AI-generated suggestions, and a methodology that meets regulatory requirements out of the box.

What you end up with

At the end of a Voyager assessment, you have:

A documented climate risk profile for each property in your portfolio
Vulnerability ratings based on both data and your team's input
Impact assessments with consequence and likelihood levels
A clear picture of which properties need mitigation measures, and why
Documentation that meets EU Taxonomy and CSRD requirements

But there's something less obvious that happens along the way: your team gets better at this.

Going through the process property by property — assessing sensitivity, discussing consequences, deciding on likelihood — builds genuine competence inside your organisation. People who felt unqualified at the start understand their portfolio's risk profile in a way they never did before. That knowledge doesn't disappear when the assessment is done. It stays in the team, informs future decisions, and makes the next assessment faster and more confident.

This is one of the underrated benefits of doing assessments in-house rather than outsourcing them. A consultant delivers a report. Voyager helps your team build expertise.