This edition
Q4 2026 · Published October 29, 2026
Build on what you can keep.
Every major disaster declared in the United States from 2021 through 2024 included the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program; none of the 93 declared since March 18, 2025 has. It is one of several shifts behind this edition. Since January 2025, federal screening tools have gone offline, FEMA has retired the National Risk Index application, OpenFEMA has removed six data feeds in a single day and NOAA has stopped updating its billion-dollar disaster series, while the EU has limited CSRD to companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in turnover and the SEC has proposed rescinding its climate rule. In our work with counties, companies and NGOs, the teams coping best can name the version and date behind every number they publish, and they anchor plans to obligations that keep running, such as the five-year hazard mitigation plan cycle, instead of programs that come and go.
The CF Labs Radar is Council Fire's quarterly, opinionated guide to the data sources, platforms, AI methods and practices that sustainability, ESG and climate resilience teams should adopt, trial, assess or hold off on. It is written for municipal resilience staff, corporate sustainability leads and NGO program teams, and it draws on our advisory work as a certified B Corp since 2010 and on CF Labs, the software studio where we build Aptation, Trovance and custom tools for clients. Building software has made us choosier about everyone's tools, our own included, so the two entries that touch our products say so plainly and sit where we would place anyone else's.
The radar
- Adopt10We'd use it by default today.
- Trial6Ready for a real project, if you go in with eyes open.
- Assess5Worth understanding now, acting on later.
- Hold7Pause, avoid or stop relying on it.
Pick a dot to read the call.
Quadrant 1
Data
OpenFEMA Hazard Mitigation Plan Statuses
FEMA's record of local, tribal and state hazard mitigation plans, with approval and expiration dates for each participating jurisdiction; it has refreshed daily since August 2026 and held 37,169 records on October 29, 2026. It is raw regional entry with at least a 24-hour lag, and one jurisdiction can sit in several plans, so judge status jurisdiction by jurisdiction. It is free, needs no API key and is the most current public signal of when mitigation grant eligibility lapses, so make it the first input to any mitigation or grants calendar.
Who it’s for: Emergency managers, planners and grants staff who need to know when a plan, and the eligibility tied to it, runs out.
Source: FEMA, OpenFEMA Hazard Mitigation Plan Statuses (v1) (opens in a new tab)
FEMA National Risk Index v1.20
FEMA's index of which U.S. communities are most at risk from 18 natural hazards. FEMA has retired the stand-alone NRI application; the December 2025 v1.20 data now sits in its Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT) and in OpenFEMA downloads, and FEMA hasn't said when it will update again. Keep using it, cite "v1.20, December 2025" every time, and don't let a dashboard imply the scores are live.
Who it’s for: Planners, consultants and analysts who use national risk scores in plans, grant narratives or capital screening.
OpenFEMA HMA Subapplications v2 and NFIP v3
On October 15, 2026, OpenFEMA removed the Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects v4 and NFIP Claims and Policies v2 feeds, including the one our Maryland county profiles were built on; the successors are HMA Subapplications v2 (63,615 records, refreshed daily) and NFIP v3. Version 2 adds fields worth using, among them a nature-based solution flag and whether sea level rise went into a project's flood elevations. Its benefit-cost ratios are as submitted by applicants and not validated by FEMA, which makes them a benchmark of what communities proposed rather than of what FEMA approved.
Who it’s for: Analysts whose dashboards, county profiles or grant benchmarks pulled from the retired feeds.
Source: FEMA, OpenFEMA HMA Subapplications (v2) (opens in a new tab)
Census Community Resilience Estimates (2024)
The Census Bureau's estimates of how many people in each county and tract carry characteristics that can deepen a disaster's impact and slow recovery, built from 10 American Community Survey topics. The 2024 release, published January 29, 2026, added social vulnerability rankings by hazard type for every county and tract. With CEJST and EJScreen offline, it is the federal vulnerability measure we would build on; its hazard ratings come from FEMA's March 2023 National Risk Index rather than v1.20, so say so when you set the two side by side.
Who it’s for: Planners, NGO program teams and grant writers who need a defensible vulnerability measure for targeting or narratives.
Cornerstone's eGRID2024 and supply chain factors v1.4
EPA's eGRID page still tops out at eGRID2023, and CARB notes that EPA hasn't released eGRID 2024 on its usual timeline. The Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative published eGRID2024 on March 17, 2026 by running EPA's open-source code (it checked that the code reproduces EPA's 2023 release but did no original quality assurance), and released supply chain emission factors v1.4.0 (October 14, 2025; AR6 warming potentials, 2024 dollars) as the next version of EPA's v1.3. CARB accepts the Cornerstone eGRID for 2026 SB 253 reports, so trial both with the publisher and version cited, and restate earlier years instead of splicing v1.3 and v1.4 factors into one trend line.
Who it’s for: Corporate GHG inventory owners calculating Scope 2 from grid factors or Scope 3 from spend.
Source: Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative, eGRID2024 v1.0.0 (Zenodo) (opens in a new tab)
Billion-dollar disaster data, now at Climate Central
NOAA retired its billion-dollar weather and climate disasters product in May 2025, with no updates after 2024. Climate Central has run the series since July 28, 2025, with the same methodology and lead scientist, and counts 447 U.S. events costing more than $3.3 trillion as of September 2026. Use it for context in plans and proposals, and credit Climate Central for anything after 2024, since NOAA's own record stops there.
Who it’s for: Grant writers, communicators and planners who cite disaster-cost trends.
Source: Climate Central, U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (opens in a new tab)
NOAA Atlas 15 precipitation frequency
The planned successor to the NOAA Atlas 14 rainfall estimates used in stormwater design: Volume 1 will account for trends in the historical record, and Volume 2 will add projections. NOAA's timeline now puts published estimates for the contiguous U.S. no earlier than September 2027, after preliminary values for peer review no earlier than September 2026, with Alaska, Hawaii and the territories a year behind. Study it now so your design standards are ready to absorb it, and don't hold projects waiting for it.
Who it’s for: Stormwater engineers, public works directors and whoever owns local design-storm standards.
Source: NOAA Office of Water Prediction, NOAA Atlas 15 (opens in a new tab)
EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data
In September 2025 EPA proposed permanently removing reporting obligations for 46 source categories and suspending the remaining oil and gas reporting until 2034. The proposal is still pending, the reporting-year 2025 deadline has slid to March 10, 2027, and the newest year on EPA's download page is 2023. Keep using past years with their dates attached, and don't build new supplier benchmarks, targets or facility screens that assume the series will continue.
Who it’s for: Corporate sustainability, procurement and investor teams that benchmark facilities or suppliers against GHGRP data.
Source: U.S. EPA, GHGRP rulemaking notices (opens in a new tab)
Quadrant 2
Platforms & tools
NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer
NOAA's free viewer maps the five relative sea level scenarios from the 2022 interagency Sea Level Rise Technical Report, with marsh migration layers updated in April 2026. That report projected 10 to 12 inches of rise along U.S. coastlines over the following 30 years and flooding more than ten times as often, with scenarios out to 2150. Make it your default coastal exposure layer, and test long-lived assets against more than one scenario.
Who it’s for: Coastal planners, port and public works staff, and anyone siting long-lived assets near tidal water.
Source: NOAA Office for Coastal Management, Sea Level Rise Viewer (opens in a new tab)
Community mirrors of removed federal tools
Public Environmental Data Partners, a volunteer coalition, hosts working copies of CEJST and FEMA's Future Risk Index, a partial EJScreen rebuild (block-group lookups of version 2.3 so far) and HIFLD Next, which holds datasets once published on DHS's HIFLD Open portal. They keep earlier analyses reproducible and give methods that depended on the originals a source to cite. Use them, and label every use as an unofficial copy of a frozen federal version.
Who it’s for: Analysts and NGO staff who must reproduce or update work built on the removed tools.
Source: Public Environmental Data Partners, screening-tools.com (opens in a new tab)
Aptation (a CF Labs product)
Our own climate resilience planning platform, built with the Resilience Authority of Annapolis & Anne Arundel County, which runs its public Resilient & Ready Anne Arundel portfolio on it. It maps a project portfolio, scores projects on criteria the community sets, tracks the funding each one is pursuing and labels benefits as potential so a plan never poses as a result; AI drafts scores and funding matches, and staff confirm every one. It is ours and young, and it does not search for grants, so we place it in Trial: worth a pilot for an agency with a real portfolio, and not yet a default.
Who it’s for: Counties, cities and regional resilience authorities managing a portfolio of projects and the funding behind them.
Waiting for EJScreen, CEJST and the Future Risk Index
CEQ's CEJST was offline by January 22, 2025, EPA ended public access to EJScreen on February 5, 2025, and FEMA removed its Future Risk Index the same month. A suit challenging the removals was dismissed for lack of standing on March 13, 2026, so stop holding plans, grant templates or targeting methods open for their return. Move live work to data that is still published, such as the Census Community Resilience Estimates, and cite archived copies as frozen snapshots.
Who it’s for: Planners, grant writers and NGO program teams whose methods or templates still cite these tools.
Source: Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program, CEJST removal tracker (opens in a new tab)
Multi-year ESG reporting software contracts
The reporting obligations these platforms are built for moved this year: Omnibus I limited CSRD to companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in turnover, the SEC proposed in May 2026 to rescind its climate rule, and CARB is still writing SB 253's rules for 2027 onward. We build software ourselves, and it has made us warier of long lock-ins. Buy annual terms, insist on full data export, and let a confirmed obligation choose the tool.
Who it’s for: Corporate sustainability leads and procurement teams buying or renewing ESG reporting software.
Source: European Parliament Legislative Train, Omnibus I (CSRD and CSDDD) (opens in a new tab)
Quadrant 3
AI & methods
Benefit-cost analysis at FEMA's 7% discount rate
OMB revoked its 2023 update to Circular A-94 on April 8, 2025, and FEMA now requires a 7% discount rate, up from 3.1%, for Hazard Mitigation Assistance projects not obligated or awarded by that date. A higher rate shrinks the present value of benefits that arrive decades out, so rerun every benefit-cost analysis in BCA Toolkit 6.0 at 7% before you write the narrative. A project that clears 1.0 only at 3.1% needs a new scope, a cheaper phase or a different funder.
Who it’s for: Local governments and consultants preparing FEMA mitigation applications, re-reviews or phased projects.
Source: FEMA, News and Notes About Benefit-Cost Analysis (opens in a new tab)
Retrieval-grounded AI over your own documents
Assistants that answer only from sources you define, such as plans, studies, permits and past grant files, and cite the page behind every claim. In a peer-reviewed test (ChatClimate, Communications Earth & Environment, 2023), GPT-4 given the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report produced answers climate experts judged more accurate than the model alone. Trial it for finding projects, commitments and deadlines buried in long documents, with a person checking every citation before anything leaves the building.
Who it’s for: Planning, sustainability and program staff who spend hours searching their own plans, reports and grant files.
Counting the electricity behind your AI use
The IEA projects that global data-centre electricity demand will more than double by 2030 to around 945 TWh, with AI the biggest driver and demand from AI-optimised data centres more than quadrupling (Energy and AI, April 2025). Ask your cloud and AI vendors for usage-based energy and emissions data now, and decide where it belongs in your inventory before your own use scales.
Who it’s for: Sustainability leads at organizations scaling AI tools that report Scope 2 or Scope 3 emissions.
Source: International Energy Agency, Energy and AI (April 10, 2025) (opens in a new tab)
Checking what AI assistants say about you
In Pew's study of March 2025 browsing, 18% of Google searches produced an AI summary, and users clicked a traditional result on 8% of those visits against 15% without one. Google says a page only needs to be indexed and snippet-eligible to appear in its AI features, with no special AI files or markup, so start with a monthly check of the questions people actually ask about your organization. CF Labs builds Trovance to automate that check for B2B teams, so weigh our view with that in mind; we rate the practice Assess.
Who it’s for: Communications and sustainability leads at companies and NGOs whose programs, claims or services people research through AI assistants.
Unreviewed AI drafts in plans, grants and disclosures
NIST's generative AI profile (AI 600-1, July 2024) names confabulation, confidently stated but false content, as a core risk, and funders have begun to act: NIH stopped considering applications substantially developed by AI from its September 25, 2025 receipt date. Our own tools use AI to draft and require a person to confirm every output. Hold any workflow that lets AI-written text reach a plan, grant narrative or disclosure without a named reviewer checking it against the sources.
Who it’s for: Grant writers, plan authors, sustainability report teams and the consultants who support them.
Source: NIST AI 600-1, Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile (July 2024) (opens in a new tab)
Black-box property-level climate risk scores
Vendor scores that compress hazard, exposure and vulnerability into one number per parcel or asset. A Nature Climate Change perspective (Fiedler et al., 2021) noted that rules for using climate science appropriately in financial risk assessment had not yet been developed, and set out the limits of what climate models can provide at the scales businesses ask about. Use such scores to screen, and keep them out of capital plans, disclosures and grant applications unless the vendor documents the models, scenarios, resolution and validation behind them.
Who it’s for: Finance, asset management and planning teams buying or citing property-level climate risk scores.
Quadrant 4
Practices
Pin, cite and archive the public data you rely on
Since January 2025, sources we use have disappeared or moved: OpenFEMA removed six data feeds on October 15, 2026 and drops three NFIP community datasets with no replacement on November 9, FEMA retired the National Risk Index application, NOAA's 2022 sea level report now lives on a different domain, and globalchange.gov, home of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, no longer resolves. Save a dated copy of every public dataset a plan, model or disclosure depends on, and cite the version and access date, as OpenFEMA's terms already require. It is cheap insurance against an analysis nobody can reproduce.
Who it’s for: Every team whose plans, dashboards, models or disclosures cite federal data.
Starting hazard mitigation plan updates two years out
FEMA requires local plans to be updated and re-approved every five years to stay eligible for mitigation project funding, under a policy guide in effect since April 11, 2025. In FEMA's plan-status data on October 29, 2026, 4,649 of the 26,424 general-purpose local governments on record (about 18%) had no current approved plan, and 537 approved local plans expire within a year. Start the update 18 to 24 months before expiration, because an approved plan sits upstream of FEMA mitigation project grants.
Who it’s for: County and municipal emergency managers and planners whose plans expire in 2027 or 2028.
Source: FEMA, Create a Hazard Mitigation Plan (opens in a new tab)
California SB 253's first filing
Companies with more than $1 billion in revenue that do business in California owe CARB their prior-fiscal-year Scope 1 and 2 emissions by November 10, 2026. For this first cycle CARB will accept what you already had or were collecting as of December 2024, with or without assurance, and asks companies that weren't collecting to file a non-reporting statement instead. File what you have, then use the year to build an inventory that can withstand the limited assurance the statute requires, since CARB is still writing the rules for 2027 onward.
Who it’s for: Sustainability and finance leads at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue that do business in California.
B Lab Standards V2.1
B Lab's new standards swap the old points-based assessment for minimum requirements across seven Impact Topics, third-party audits and mandatory milestones at years three and five, and the first nine companies certified under them in June 2026. B Corps due to recertify in 2026 received a 12-month extension, and B Lab expects all 2027 and 2028 recertifications to use the new standards. As a B Corp since 2010, we'd start the gap assessment a full year before your date, because each requirement has to be met on its own terms instead of being offset by points elsewhere.
Who it’s for: B Corps with recertification dates from 2026 through 2028, and companies weighing first certification.
IFRS S2 as the disclosure backbone
With the SEC proposing in May 2026 to rescind its climate rule and Omnibus I limiting CSRD to companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in turnover, ISSB's IFRS S2 is the most portable baseline: 23 jurisdictions have published adoption profiles with the IFRS Foundation, with snapshots for 13 more (September 2026). Its December 2025 amendments, effective January 2027, ease the financed-emissions and warming-potential requirements. Build one climate data set to IFRS S2 and map it to CSRD, California and customer questionnaires instead of running parallel programs.
Who it’s for: Sustainability and finance leads at companies with international investors, customers or subsidiaries.
SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0
Published in June 2026, V2.0 asks for two or more near-term targets with an optional overarching net-zero target, pursued on a best-efforts basis with assumptions disclosed, and treats high-integrity carbon credits as a complement to cutting emissions. Validation under it opens in early 2027, it becomes mandatory after January 31, 2028, and the SBTi itself tells companies setting targets in 2026 to use V1.3.1. Assess it now so a 2027 target doesn't have to be built twice.
Who it’s for: Companies setting, renewing or revalidating SBTi targets between now and 2028.
Source: Science Based Targets initiative, Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 (opens in a new tab)
GHG Protocol's Scope 2 revision
The 2025-26 consultation proposed hourly matching and deliverability for market-based Scope 2 and drew low support from respondents. As of October 16, 2026, the GHG Protocol's standards board backs a dual-method approach that keeps today's rules available until a date still to be set, plans another consultation for Q2 2027, and slates the joint GHG Protocol and ISO corporate standard for Q4 2028. Ask your utility for hourly consumption data now, but don't sign long-term power contracts to satisfy a draft.
Who it’s for: Energy and sustainability leads who manage renewable procurement and report market-based Scope 2.
Source: GHG Protocol, Scope 2 market-based method update (October 16, 2026) (opens in a new tab)
Offset-based "carbon neutral" product claims
Since September 27, 2026, EU consumer law has banned claims that a product is carbon-neutral or has a reduced, compensated or positive climate impact on the strength of offsets bought outside its value chain, and it requires sustainability labels to rest on a third-party certification scheme or a public authority. Company-level offset claims fall outside that ban but still face the general test for misleading practices, and reporting carbon-credit investments stays allowed if it is transparent. If you sell to EU consumers, pull offset-based product claims and uncertified labels now; everywhere else, describe credits as funding you provided rather than emissions you erased.
Who it’s for: Marketing, product and sustainability teams at companies that sell to consumers in the EU or use climate labels.
Capital plans that count on BRIC or HMGP
Every major disaster declared from 2021 through 2024 included the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program; according to OpenFEMA's declarations data on October 29, 2026, none of the 93 declared since March 18, 2025 has. BRIC's $1 billion round closed July 23, 2026 with selections still pending, and FEMA won't review applications from the January 2025 round. Keep federal mitigation grants in the plan as upside, and build the base case on state, utility, local and private money.
Who it’s for: County and city finance, resilience and grants staff building multi-year capital and mitigation plans.
Source: FEMA, OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2) (opens in a new tab)
What we’re seeing
The teams coping best can name the version and date behind every number they publish.
Method
How we rate.
We started from the questions clients brought us this year and the data our own tools depend on, then kept only entries we could tie to a primary source (agency datasets and notices, standard setters, vendor documentation and peer-reviewed research), each checked as of October 29, 2026, with versions and dates noted; where an entry cites a count from a federal API, such as the plan-status and disaster-declaration figures, we ran the query ourselves that day. Adopt means we would use it by default today; Trial means it is ready for a real project if you go in with eyes open; Assess means it is worth understanding now and acting on later; Hold means pause, avoid or stop relying on it, whether it is a tool, a dataset that went dark or a habit that no longer holds up. Every entry is marked new because this is the first edition; from the next one, the flag marks what moved.
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