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.
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. But the transition from insurable to uninsurable is the final stage of a sequence that can take years or decades to play out.
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.
Climate resilience is often framed as a problem of insufficient funding. In reality, it is a problem of how funding is structured and deployed.
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.
The federal government's retreat from climate adaptation has created a gap in data, funding, and coordination, but a new decentralized ecosystem of nonprofits, state governments, and coalitions is stepping up to fill the void and may prove more resilient to political disruption in the long run.
As federal disaster support shrinks, resilience districts offer local governments a promising new financing tool to fund climate adaptation on their own terms.
Resilience districts give local governments a new financing mechanism to fund climate adaptation, but their success depends on applying a forward-looking, risk-informed approach rather than defaulting to traditional bond financing logic.
The absence of references to climate change in utilities' bond disclosures suggests we have not systematically assessed how climate hazards could disrupt operations or revenues and, just as concerning, that they aren’t incorporating climate risk into capital planning and investment decisions.
Property insurance markets across the U.S. are under strain as premiums rise and insurers pull back from high-risk regions. In response, a growing number of states are leaning on public and quasi-public reinsurance backstops.
