The Weekly: Alabama Used Five Financing Levers to Scale Resilient Building Standards Across the State
Alabama’s approach to scaling the FORTIFIED standard has become a blueprint nationwide.
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.
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
Wildfire-prone communities across the West are no longer waiting for federal dollars to mitigate wildfire risk. As FEMA funding stalls and detection technology gets cheaper, local districts are investing in wildfire-detection sensors, drones, and AI-monitored cameras.
With fire seasons now roughly two months longer than they were in the 1970s, 2026 could reset the ceiling on wildfire losses again.
Incrementalism is often dismissed as not scalable enough to translate into population-level outcomes. But a series of incremental changes, conducted by various stakeholders in concert, can translate into new norms, higher standards, and more resilient cities.
Incrementalism is often dismissed as not scalable enough to translate into population-level outcomes. But a series of incremental changes, conducted by various stakeholders in concert, can translate into new norms, higher standards, and more resilient cities.
As climate-driven hazards accelerate, a dangerous structural misalignment has emerged: What building codes deem legally permissible to construct is increasingly at odds with what catastrophic risk models deem financially viable to insure.