People around the world seek climate-risk information to guide their decisions. For instance, projections about future flood risk inform where households choose to live, how lenders manage credit risks, and which communities receive preference for federal funds. However, fundamental validation and verification challenges raise important concerns about the reliability of such projections. Accordingly, many promote and standardize research transparency and reusability as foundations of reliable climate-risk knowledge because they enable rigorous scrutiny of methods, development of foundational tools, and design of evaluation standards. Despite prominent success stories in the field, we find a substantial gap between principles and practice: only four percent of the most-cited peer-reviewed climate-risk studies in recent years fully share their data and code despite this being a widely accepted minimum standard for transparency. We highlight low-cost measures that researchers can immediately implement to improve transparency and reusability. Yet we recognize that transformative progress requires substantial investments, cross-sector collaboration, and careful consideration of tradeoffs, data rights, and multiple perspectives on equity. We hope this perspective accelerates both immediate actions and longer-term conversations to improve the ability of science to effectively support timely, evidence-based, and sound climate-risk management.

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