The Great Unlock
How public, private, and philanthropic leaders can scale the next chapter of climate resilience. A national call to action prepared for Chicago Climate Week and Aspen Ideas: Climate.
Bespoke deals are too complex to scale. Broad “green” designations are too vague to measure. A middle route can fund adaptation at the pace climate risk demands.
The drivers that make extreme heat so severe were all in play over Independence Day weekend: More people live in areas exposed to extreme heat, existing infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme heat, and cooling is expensive and not universally accessible.
Four New Jersey towns are charging property owners for stormwater runoff and using the money to fund flood repairs.
Resilience projects become finance-ready by doing the early work of proving who benefits, quantifying the value of avoided losses, and building the partnerships that make private capital possible.
Insurance markets don't become uninsurable overnight. The transition from insurable to uninsurable is the final stage of a sequence that can take years or decades to play out.
Insurance markets don't become uninsurable overnight. But the transition from insurable to uninsurable is the final stage of a sequence that can take years or decades to play out.
By adopting green infrastructure in place of some gray infrastructure, Kansas City reduced the total costs of managing its combined sewer system through 2040 by over $2 billion.
Cities spent decades building pipes and pumps to move water out fast. Hoboken tried absorbing it instead—and cut flooding by 88%.
The economic losses from disasters that are not covered by insurance continue to grow, but resilience projects are generating measurable positive returns.
If today’s funding landscape resembles disconnected wells, then climate resilience requires something closer to a watershed—where resources are intentionally pooled, directed, and circulated across geographies, sectors, and time horizons.
From wildfire prevention to flash flood forecasting, better data is enabling earlier, more targeted decisions about risk
From June through August, warming temperatures and atmospheric moisture combine to produce the hail, tornadoes, and derechos that are now responsible for more cumulative insured losses than tropical cyclones.