Impact data provider Upright has launched physical climate and transition risk assessment capabilities on its platform, extending its sustainability analytics into a function that companies and investors currently handle with point solutions. The launch targets a specific pain point: customers want one toolset to quantify climate risk across operations, supply chains and portfolios instead of stitching together multiple vendors.

The Helsinki-based company said the move also marks a broader expansion from sustainability risk analysis into procurement and wider supplier and value-chain risk.

Founder and CEO Annu Nieminen said the product builds on work Upright has already done. "We've spent years mapping companies to their products and value chains and translating sustainability exposure into financial terms, so adding product-level, financial-grade climate risk was a no-brainer when customers were increasingly asking us for it."

What the platform does

Upright connects global climate science datasets to company-level information — what a company produces, where it operates, and how its value chain functions — with what the company describes as minimal additional data requirements from users.

The underlying science data spans NASA NEX-GDDP-CMIP6, ISIMIP, WRI Aqueduct Floods and the STORM cyclone dataset, all run under IPCC climate scenarios.

On the transition risk side, the platform maps what a company produces and sells to Upright's proprietary product and service taxonomy, producing site- and product-level climate risk assessments. Physical risk capabilities map hazards to actual site locations and can be viewed across three IPCC warming scenarios, with projections available for individual years from 2026 through 2100.

Supplier screening without questionnaires

The use cases Upright lists point directly at reporting and procurement workflows. Companies can use the capabilities to comply with climate risk reporting requirements and to screen their supplier base without sending questionnaires — identifying the sites and suppliers with the greatest exposure and directing engagement, mitigation and dual-sourcing decisions accordingly.

For investors, the platform screens climate exposure across public and private portfolios and assesses new targets and holdings without additional data requests.

Consolidation pressure

Nieminen framed the launch as a response to a sustainability software market under strain. "The sustainability market is under pressure from every direction: regulation keeps shifting, budgets are tighter, and AI is changing what customers expect from software. We've decided to lean into that rather than defend the old way of working. Let machines do the data production, make the underlying evidence traceable, and use the same infrastructure for more of the work."

That consolidation logic matters for the industrial and recycling sectors, where climate disclosure regimes increasingly demand asset-level physical risk data — flood, cyclone and water-stress exposure at named sites — rather than portfolio averages. Suppliers to large manufacturers already face questionnaire-based screening under customer sustainability programs; a screening approach that bypasses questionnaires shifts the burden onto data providers and away from the surveyed parties.

The test ahead is regulatory. As climate risk reporting requirements tighten across jurisdictions, the demand Upright cites from customers will either translate into contracted platform users or confirm that sustainability software spending is being cut along with broader ESG budgets — the very pressure Nieminen says the company is betting against.