Rohan Hamden brings South Australian background to boom time for XDI climate change risk advice

Rohan Hamden, co founder of XDI (Cross Dependency Initiative), had a background with the South Australian government in strategy and risk management, sustainability and industry partnership, and water and climate change policy.
Climate change image by Kelly Sikkema

XDI (Cross Dependency Initiative), a global risk management company set up with South Australia’s Rohan Hamden as a founder from 2017, was experiencing rapid growth in 2022 as businesses assessed the impacts of climate change to their investments.

Hamden, with the XDI startup based at Lot Fourteen on North Terrace, Adelaide city, was a graduate of Adelaide, South Australia and Queensland universities in business administration, applied science and biotechnology. He worked for the South Australian government in strategy and risk management, sustainability and industry partnership, and water and climate change policy.

Hamden admitted the XDI: The Cross Dependency Initiative was “ahead of the curve” in its aim to supply global businesses with infrastructure risk assurance, based on climate change science, infrastructure engineering and advanced statistics to help organisations understand how climate change could impact their built infrastructure.

The XDI focus was on “making sure that the decision makers had everything they need to make climate change action easy. We thought the best way to do that was to quantify climate change in financial and risk terms, and in a way that is actionable. Weather events affect anything built such as houses, pipes, buildings”.

XDI had worked with organisations as diverse as Blackrock to the national broadband network across Australia, to the state of New South Wales  and the province of British Columbia in Canada.

Hamden said the British Columbia provincial government engaged XDI to do climate risk assessments of their network of hospitals. “Once you build a hospital somewhere, it becomes a centre and everything is built around it. You could put a hospital out in the middle of nowhere and a town and an entire economy would emerge around it. That community will be around for 100 years.

“We identify that they’ve got flooding risk over the next decade and fire risk will come in a few decades, On the back of the assessment, the government improved the design of hospitals to mitigate flooding risks and ensure they weren’t getting power from vulnerable substations.” They also improved cooling systems, after XDI’s risk modelling showed internal temperatures could become unbearable during a loss of power caused by weather events.