The telecom executive focused on climate impacts

Shannon Thomas Carroll, head of global environmental sustainability for AT&T, knows how difficult it is to find reliable climate data. When sustainability officials at the telecommunications giant began searching for local-level data on climate impacts as part of the company’s efforts to shore up its infrastructure in response to climate change, they had a lot of trouble finding usable information. So AT&T engaged the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in 2019 with about $1.6 million in funding to help with its resiliency project, which culminated in the development of a tool to model how climate change will impact weather disasters over the next 30 years. In May 2022, the company publicly unveiled new projections on how future wildfires and droughts will affect the contiguous 48 states. Carroll spoke at the Aspen Ideas: Climate conference in Miami Beach (FL) about why the company launched and funded the project, what the data says and doesn’t say about climate risk and the importance of getting internal stakeholders on board.